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FLOODED LONDON – FIVE IMAGES OF THE FUTURE
Five images of London after the imaginary Great Flood of 2090, by the UK group Squint/Opera are exhibited at Jacaranda Images, 1st Circle from 5 to 30 April 2009.
Three hundred and forty years after the Great Fire of London comes the Great Flood – but the flood of 2090 is a different order of catastrophe altogether…
London in the 1660s was awash with predictions of doom and gloom as one disaster piled on another – the plague was raging, a tornado strode up the Thames, the Great Fire gutted the City of London. The end of the world was surely nigh… Yet somehow the world – and London – survived.
Now, in the early 21st century, with doom and gloom back in fashion. Nick Taylor and the company Squint/Opera wanted to portray a London of the future, after today’s environmental doomsday predictions have played themselves out. This realisation of a London taken back by the sea is curiously utopian – we see life carrying on, and people still finding moments for creativity and enjoyment.
The five images of ‘Flooded London’ are snapshots of people’s lives some time after the catastrophe, obliquely depicting adaptations to a near-deserted urban environment where an office block like Canary Wharf is a place to go fishing and a street in Honor Oak turns into a slipway. The catastrophic side of the sea coming in has long since past and the images are snapshots of people going about their lives, having adapted to the city’s new circumstance.
Squint/Opera, an award-winning film and media studio which produces films, animations, web sites and installations, used photography, 3D modelling and image manipulation to imitate the techniques and aesthetic of Victorian landscape painters. Exaggerated details play with scale to present images that conceal their composition. The series of fantastical 3d images have been on display as part of the London Architecture Festival in the summer of 2008.
Nick Taylor and Squint/Opera
Following a degree in architecture, Nick spent a year designing elements of a rural hospital in Malawi. Returning to London, he launched himself into the fledgling digital art world and founded Binary Heart in 1999, making visualisations and animations for architects.
In 2004 he merged with Squint/Opera, a young film production company which unites the work of directors, animators, artists, writers and music composers to create computer generated visualisations, installations and short films about the built environment. Their projects include work for Amman, Restoring Historic Jeddah; Plan Abu Dhabi 2030; Britain’s Olympic Stadium 2012; Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay; Bradford Centre Regeneration; Future of Cities for the Danish Royal Academy of Architecture.
Nick is the nephew of Amman based archeologist and photographer, Jane Taylor.
