Backstory / Worldbuilding
I have been thinking a lot about world building recently, now that the film is done and it’s moving into new spaces. I don’t want this to end. I don’t want this project to end, I don’t want this world to stop existing. If this machine, the Time Traveler Tetra Vision, is able to do all these things, then why should the world it exists in be finite? This does not make sense to me at all.
Having thought about a lot recently, I came to the conclusion that the world doesn’t need to end if I don’t want it to end. Plus, I have always been (unknowingly) obsessed with world building. One of the main memories that comes to my mind, is that I would always go to the Boijmans van Beuningen museum here in Rotterdam and be obsessed with a body of work titled ‘The Islanders’ by Charles Avery. I would visit it as often as I could, looking at the images of headless interconnected dogs (called ‘Duculi’) and thinking about the world he had created.
The Island at the centre of Avery’s constructed world is located on an archipelago. Its gateway is the town of Onomatopoeia, a highly textured metropolis that bears the hallmarks of an evolving urban landscape. Once a colonial outpost, the town transformed into a bustling metropolis, a depression-ravaged slum, and finally a regenerated city of culture and tourism.
The spirit of Avery’s imaginary Island is integrally connected with mathematics, philosophy, economics and anthropology, while drawing on literature and comedy. Key elements of the fictional world are rendered in physical forms through Avery’s sculptures and installations. As Avery has stated, the Island is “a gymnasium for the imagination”. Source: Grimm Gallery
What fascinates me most about this, is how you can make up a set of rules, and the create an entire world from it. Going through the archives, and this residency, I’ve also had to reckon with many questions surrounding the device from which all this material has been extracted from. Even when deep in creative collaboration with Andreas Brooks, the works art director & graphic designer, I’ve had to often ask myself many questions — and now I find these questions are still being asked:
- Who does this machine belong to?
- How does the machine function?
- How much storage does it have?
- What files output does it give?
- What interface does it have?
And these are only for the purpose of design, right? But then, I wonder, what happens if I go further? I have so many ideas already, so many questions of my own, which means this project wants to expand. I find myself dreaming of new formats to explore this object, but also utlising this object to explore more archives and reach into them to bring them out into the world with the Time Traveler Tetra Vision functioning as a catalyst. In trying to find ways to further build upon my wishes, ideas + dreams, I recently submitted a proposal for Open Archief 5.0 — Acess & Agency. Open Archief is a multifaceted, collaborative project that explores the potentials of what can be inspired by making archival material accessible to artists for creative reuse. For this specific proposal, I suggested to expand this world I built during my residency with Sound & Vision, and because its mandatory to do a publication, I came up with the idea of publishing a newspaper. Here’s a snippet of that proposal:
“[...]The discovery of this device is the starting point for my proposal for Open Archief 5.0: Access & Agency, in which I envision a printed newspaper that feratures the story of this device, its possible owner, and the materials it contains. Combining speculative reporting, opinion pieces, essays, and archival imagery, the publication will unfold as an on-going investigation. A newspaper, to me, is an interesting medium through which to examine the politics of
information. Often associated with the circulation of facts and the reporting of events, it occupies an ambiguous position between documentation, interpretation, and the construction of narratives. What do we consider news? What makes something credible? What is considered ‘real’? And, who decides what is worth reporting? These questions resonate with the institutional archive; often perceived as a repository of historical evidence, yet shaped
by decisions about what is collected, preserved, described, made accessible, or left out. The discovery of the Tetra Vision introduces a further complication: if an apparatus is found without a known owner, does its discovery automatically grant us access to its contents?”
— Tarona (Proposal Submission, Open Archief 5.0, Access & Agency, October 2026)
This then led me to consider the rules around this device. Which then needs the consideration of the world in which this device exists. Or even more so, where this device originates from. This got me thinking about creating an entire universe for it, including not only rules for the device, but also rules for when one is allowed a device, how far one can time travel at what age, to what era, what restrictions there are etc. Many film directors, I recently discovered, write extensive ‘backstories’; a whole history to a character that we might not see in the film, but that can be used to inform the filmmakers or the actors’ playing a specific character. If the device is a charachter in the film, then what is it’s entire backstory?
I am looking forward to expanding this universe of Time Traveler Tetra Vision.
Oh, before I forget — I already started: tttv.world
Signing off, signing out!
— T.
Connective material
Charles Avery's Untitled (Installation view of Duculi), 2006.
Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Cubitt Gallery, London
Dungeons & Dragons Worldbuilding Chart
26-12Text, Images, Video
23-10-2026