This is What We Imagine (TIWWI for short, pronounced teewee) is the name of an art and video collective based in Los Angeles that specializes in music videos, films, photography, production design, costume design, and visual effects. Members of TIWWI have talents and passions that, much like the state of the universe, are in constant expansion and infinite in spirit.

Rumor has it that TIWWI began somewhere between 1 and 150 years ago. Some whispering library inhabitants have been overheard sharing the secrets of its origin: a 19th century underground creative think tank aptly named The Royal Winchester Thought Assembly. Their reasoning: the Thought Assembly’s founder – Frederick Finton, a self-proclaimed intellectual adventurer – muttered the words, “this, this is what I imagine” as he reached completion of his long awaited Experiential Muli-Dimension Transpositioner. This has been neither confirmed nor denied.

TIWWI’s current founders and members prefer to operate under anonymity because as they like to say, “some of the greatest stories need no authors.” Perhaps they are noble, perhaps they are shy, or perhaps their favorite stories are mysteries.

Until recently, many regarded humans to be the only species capable of participating in, documenting and sharing fictional or non-fictional narratives – the only species capable of having an imagination. Yet in 1968, revolutionary theoretician Douglas S. Finton (Frederick’s great grandson) discovered the potential for “trans-existential story-telling.” In his essay entitled “Everything is Everything is Always,” Finton described a broader, universal consciousness that encompassed all species, objects, and states of existence. This consciousness made it possible for all things to engage in the function of imagination. “A rock, simply by being,” Finton noted, “defies third party perception, for its existence is one which defines itself. A rock is not not a rock. Therefore, since the rock exists as something and not something else, it must be aware of what it is not. And what it is not is fiction which bestows a series of other, inevitable “nots” and fictions which bestow, dare I say it, imagination.” Finton further described trans-existential storytelling as a series of universal moments, perhaps unbeknown to the very things the moments are occurring to.

With that in mind then, one of the earliest stories was about a cloud of hydrogen gas in the vastness of space moving once to the left and once to the right. And one of the most recent stories is about the very moment you are reading these very words. Between those two points in time, TIWWI has told a few of their own stories. This is what they imagine.

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