A CRT TV showing the landing page of Teletext WRN1

WRN1 is a multi-/nonlinear narrative space inside teletext.

Created by Jonas Müller, Nils Lange, Nino Coaz & Stefan Kraft at Zurich University of the Arts in 2019.

Explore fictional TV channel WRN1's teletext to find answers to the broadcast signal's mysterious disappearance.

An homage to technological obsolescence, teletext, its strange content, and the people who frequent it.



-> Web version: German / English



A teletext frame: Yellow text on black stating that the signal is missing. A teletext frame: A glitched-out SMS chat. Text: Fernsehen ist einfach nicht mehr das, was es einmal war.
A TV showing a teletext chatroom. The TV is in front of a projector that says 'HDMI1 No Signal'

The original exhibition piece runs on a Raspberry Pi and produces a genuine teletext video signal to be played on a TV with hardware teletext capabilities.

The pages were created using Simon Rawles' edit.tf teletext frame editor and exported as .tti files. Page numbers and status bits were set using a small Python script, and streaming is done using Peter Kwan's VBIT2.

The web viewer is an adapted version of Adam Dawes' Teletext Viewer, which itself is an adapted version of the edit.tf editor.

An old Sony TV remote, a Raspberry Pi in a case with WRN1 on it, and a composite video cable.

Structurally, the narrative space is laid out for breadth rather than depth. References and links in between branches encourage repeated exploration in different directions while mirroring the structure of actual TV teletext.

A teletext frame: A branching path with page numbers on them. A teletext frame: A yellow rhombus. Text: Schöpfer ist geschaffenes und umgekehrt.
A teletext frame: Advertising text for vacation in Kyoto. A teletext frame: A hand reaching out and burning itself on a doorknob.

The project was exhibited at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2022 in San Francisco, USA. As the original was in German, all 267 pages were manually translated into English for the US exhibit. The new English pages are the ones found in the web version.

As no US CRT TV we could find had the necessary hardware to decode the teletext signal, a small European LCD TV we brought along in our luggage was used.

A TV showing a teletext chatroom. The TV is in front of a projector that says 'HDMI1 No Signal'
A teletext frame: An aurora above a city skyline. Text: Das Polarlicht. In all den gleichen Farben wie auf meinem Schirm.