Data and Deity | Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration
Tekja designed and developed a conceptual, data-driven screen-based animation installation inspired by the global water cycle. Designed as a permanent exhibit for the new Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, housed in the historic New River Head waterworks, the installation juxtaposes technical, modern water monitoring systems and data collection with ancient concepts of deities controlling the rains and seas.
Tekja created a grid of 180 lines to represent the Earth’s latitude degrees. This visual concept unified the data, which was mapped along these lines, and the deities, drawn by illustrator Yehrin Tong using the same grid. The outcome is a sequence of temporal data scenes, depicting warming oceans, increasing flood and drought events, annual precipitation patterns, disrupted by emerging mythological figures transforming the data-driven grid lines, overriding the precision and authority of the data with images of deities associated with ancient stories of fear, power and the unknown.
