PRTV

A collaborative research project exploring how speculative worldbuilding can reveal new ways of understanding real places through archives, participation and collective imagination.

Creator • Active • 2025 – Present

Explore PRTV →

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PRTV, the Peterlee Relational Test Vehicle, applies the methods developed through The Constant State to a real place.

Developed in collaboration with artists, writers, designers and local communities, the project uses speculative worldbuilding as a way of exploring Peterlee’s past, present and possible futures. Rather than documenting the town as it is, PRTV constructs fictional institutions, archives and civic narratives that invite people to see familiar places differently.

Imagination becomes a method of investigation.

Participants contribute fragments rather than finished stories. Documents, maps, artefacts, photographs and recordings accumulate within a growing civic archive where fact and fiction deliberately coexist. As relationships emerge between these contributions, new perspectives on the town begin to surface.

Current areas of development include:

Public Archive
Speculative Mapping
Civic Mythologies
Digital Platform
Workshops
Exhibitions

My role focuses on creative direction, editorial systems and worldbuilding, designing the structures through which people contribute, connect and reinterpret material over time. The archive grows through participation rather than central authorship, allowing many voices to shape a shared speculative landscape.

Although rooted in Peterlee, PRTV explores broader questions about memory, identity, belonging and the role imagination can play in understanding the places we inhabit.

Rather than creating evidence of an imagined place, PRTV uses imagined evidence to reveal new ways of seeing a real one.

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