1K Gallery

The rule

Two travellers, one anomaly

In every work in the collection the two figures occupy deliberately fixed positions. The repetition is not decoration: it gives the collection a grammar. Whatever the place, the viewer knows immediately which one is which.

The contrast between the two sets up an opposition that the collection never resolves: they look like men from different points on the same line, standing in the same place at the same instant.

The places

Twenty-five points of passage

Each work places the two travellers in front of one of twenty-five recognisable locations. The setting is far more than a backdrop. Within the collection's narrative, each location reads as a crossing point between coordinates of space and time.

London, Paris, New York, Rome, Cairo — inside these works a city stops being a city and becomes a doorway. The same figure appears before different monuments and landscapes, and the accumulation suggests something other than a journey around the planet: the travellers are not moving across a map, they are moving across realities.

The technique

Pixels as dematerialisation

The choice of pixel art carries the concept rather than illustrating it. A pixel is a small unit that only becomes an image in combination with others — and that is exactly what the collection proposes about its travellers.

To move through space and time, a body would have to stop being matter fixed in one position. It would have to come apart at one point of reality and be rebuilt at another. The pixelated surface makes that visible: the figures look assembled from discrete digital units, as though their matter could be converted into information, carried, and reconstructed.

Pixel art also connects the work to the history of video games, computing and digital culture — which builds a bridge between two things that seem unrelated: old stories about people who arrived from another time, and the technology of our own.

And there is a second layer, one the collection performs rather than depicts. These characters begin as fiction and end as digital information recorded on a blockchain. The work repeats the journey it describes.

The two figures

Where the stories come from

John Zegrus was a real person. In October 1959 a man recorded under that name entered Japan; three months later he was arrested in Tokyo on suspicion of identity fraud, and his passport was found to be counterfeit. The Japanese press called him the Mystery Man. He gave investigators an elaborate biography spanning several countries and conflicts, none of which could be verified. In August 1960 a Tokyo court convicted him of document fabrication.

The legend grew afterwards, and largely by accident. A Canadian newspaper reported the case with alterations, describing a passport issued by a country that appears on no map. The story reached the British House of Commons in July 1960, cited as evidence that passports made poor security checks. Later authors embellished it further, and eventually websites devoted to the unexplained reshaped it into a tale of a man from another dimension who vanished from a guarded hotel room.

A forged passport became a country that never existed, and a convicted forger became a visitor from elsewhere.

John Titor was never a person at all. Between 1998 and 2001, someone using that name — and, earlier, the handle TimeTravel_0 — posted on internet forums claiming to be an American soldier from the year 2036, sent back to 1975 to recover an IBM 5100 computer needed to repair legacy systems in his own time.

What gave the story its grip was a detail. The poster described an undocumented capability of the 5100 that was not public knowledge in 2000, but which engineers who had worked on the machine later confirmed. The predictions that followed — an American civil war from 2004, a nuclear exchange in 2015 — did not happen, and the author covered that in advance by invoking the many-worlds interpretation, which made every claim unfalsifiable. The last post appeared in March 2001. Investigations have pointed at names; no one has ever publicly claimed authorship.

Both stories are treated as folklore, unverified accounts and speculative fiction — not as established evidence of travel through time. That uncertain zone, between record and invention, is the territory the collection works in.

References

• John Zegrus — Wikipedia
• John Titor — Wikipedia