A Whole New World

Artist Statement: 

For this project I worked with Max and Jesse to create a world where people regenerate when they die. We had several interesting conversations about what that would mean for a world, and on how it would even work. We decided that when people regenerated that they would show up at a ‘regeneration point’. Regeneration points were a major factor when we considered the layout of the world. Also, because death and regeneration are the norm in this world, we thought it would be fun to make a “how to” pamphlet for kids, like you would find at a doctor’s office, to explain the process in simple terms.

We also talked a lot about extreme sports, because if death wasn’t a factor, extreme sports would be on a whole new level. We asked ourselves this question: What would you do if you didn’t have to worry about dying? Thus the Gladiator Games were born. Basically it’s similar to regular gladiator fights, but there is also an extreme sports aspect to it. We decided that it would be similar to our Olympics, a worldwide sporting event that people train for and try to win different prizes.

We decided that dying and regenerating in this world would be painful, so that there was a cost associated with this ability. That way we were able to bring politics into it, with the invention of the Restart injection. We wanted to have something that could be potentially revolutionary, and think about the issues that would come with it. I got to write this piece and it actually was a lot of fun trying to come up with arguments for each side, and reasons for and against it.

In Design Fiction, Julian Bleeker mentions that it is essentially linking the imagination to its material form and that’s exactly what this project was like for me. I was able to take a world that we had just made up and come up with substance from that world. It made me think of J.R.R. Tolkien, and how he created entire languages for the people of Middle Earth, which in turn gave substance to that world, and made it a tiny bit more real.

To me World Building is an especially spiritual kind of creativity. In trying to build a small portion of this fictional world I became more aware of exactly how much incredible detail is put in to the world around us.  With this realization I became even more convinced that God is real, because how could He not be? Everything around us is overflowing with His signature, and I am so grateful for the beautiful world He has built for all of us.

~Brontë Campbell