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A conversation with Julianne Aguilar about the characters of Radio Tave, Meow Wolf’s newest exhibition in Houston, Texas.
Photo by Atlas Media/Jess Gallo.
*Note: There are story and lore spoilers about the Meow Wolf exhibitions in the content below.
Julianne Aguilar is a writer, world-builder and story lead for Meow Wolf. Her art and narrative approaches are rooted in science-fiction and are part of what make Meow Wolf stories so visceral yet strangely mysterious. She incorporates experimental play and futuristic possibilities in everything she creates, giving her readers and consumers the opportunity to let their minds wander with choice.
I'm curious how you got started with this project or became connected with Meow Wolf to begin with.
I first started at Meow Wolf back in 2018. I was part of the original iteration of the story team.
Back then, we were called the “narrative team.” My first project that I worked on was Convergence Station, in Denver. It was the first project all of us were kind of thrown into. Obviously, our team was brand new, so we didn't really have a lot of processes set in stone. They were just like, here's this exhibition. Here are some blueprints… go crazy. In retrospect, I was like, like, wow, they put a lot of trust in us. But it worked out. Everything that has happened since then, we've tried to improve upon– like our process and the way we do things. I really felt like that all culminated in Houston. I think it’s our strongest story yet. The way we introduce the story in the exhibition, the guest experience and the story itself, and just our approach to how we wrote the story and how we planned the story throughout the exhibition... I think we really have taken the best of everything that we have done so far and distilled it all into Radio Tave.
Wow. So what did your first ideas for Radio Tave look like?
We were presented with this framing that there's a radio station, there's five main characters, and the radio station is no longer on Earth. That was kind of it. We're like, okay, okay, so let's decide. Let's start with these five characters. Who are they? What are their roles? What do we know about radio? How does a radio station even work?
So we did a bunch of research and we looked at a ton of photographs of community and college radio stations from across the U.S. and just learned about how a radio station staff works. We then knew that we needed a station manager, a music director, a couple of interns and someone who's an engineer who's actually working on the hardware and building stuff. That's where we started with our characters and then we fleshed them out from there, including really basic stuff like gender, age, are they in a relationship? Have they ever been married? How do they all get along with each other? So we had this chart that looks like a rat's nest of like all of these lines pointing to every other character of how did they get along? You know, what are their interpersonal lives like? Everything just kind of grew out of there. Once we knew who the characters were, it became really easy to flesh out the backstory of the exhibition and to flesh out what's going on today.
One of the big conflicts when you walk into the exhibition is what is happening right now? One of our five main characters has just left. He's gone off into the multiverse on his own. When we first started working on the story, we actually didn't know that that was going to happen. That just naturally was the result of our development for that character.
We asked each other, “Don't you think he would probably want to go off on his own on a grand adventure?” And at first I was like, No, we can't break up these characters and then I was like we need to break up these characters. It just needs to happen - we need to throw a monkey wrench into their dynamic and see how they deal with it and where they are going. It also set us up to use some of these characters in future stories.
Right. So that brings me to ask: how is Radio Tave interconnected with the larger Meow Wolf universe?
Yeah, that's a great question. All of our stories are interconnected in some ways. Some of the ways are pretty big. Some of the ways are kind of small. This is the one where we have really gone all in on the concept of “taving.” It's right there in the name. The story began on earth, but it's no longer on earth. It's in the Glen, which is this world between worlds. It really gives these characters access to all of our stories. All of our stories touch this unknown space in one little way or another. We have a recurring character, Lucius, who of course, comes from the House of Eternal Return. We have references to Convergence Station. We have a Convergence Station character who has a show on the Radio Tave broadcast.
We have Omega Mart Easter eggs. Marin actually calls into the show. She's out taving, so she calls in and she's talking about her experiences taving and what that's like for her. The Delaney Fuqua family comes and visits because they're at the end of their story in Grapevine. They have all gone off to the multiverse together, which is really sweet that they're on this cosmic road trip. So as part of the road trip, they stopped by the ETNL radio station and Gordon plays a show. We've got a little something from every single story in here. And we're setting some of our characters up to appear in our later stories and continue their journeys through our crazy story universe.
So is Marin technically still missing when she calls?
Marin is still missing. Yeah, we do hear from her a little bit. We don't know exactly where she is or where she'll turn up next, but we just want to remind people like she's out there, you know, she's on her own fantastical journey and we will hear from her again.
That's really cool. I love that. That's a fun pop in, especially for people who are wondering.
Yes, we're wondering, we want to know!
Well I did stalk your website and it was clear that Deep Space Nine is a pretty big influence for you.
I love Star Trek. It's the best.
I am curious how it plays into your writing and if it comes up at all.
Oh my gosh, it really does. I think my entire team loves Star Trek. I think we're really inspired by the world-building and by all of the interpersonal relationships between all of these characters and the way they all fit together. It's obviously not a multiverse, but you know, you'll see characters popping up from one show to another and from one movie to another. We're just really inspired by the writing, it’s so strong, whether it's the spirit of adventure in the Next Generation or this really super close knit family in DS9 and Voyager as well. I think we're really inspired by Voyager, like this idea of we're lost and we're trying to go home or we're trying to go somewhere, but we have to work together in the meantime. There's something from all of the nineties track shows, at least, that we're all really inspired by. I think we all love Lower Decks as well. DS9, especially, I mean, it has a really wonderful overarching story. You really get into the nitty gritty of each character. There's just really great character development for even really minor characters. No one's left behind.
Have you seen I Saw The TV Glow yet?
Everyone is telling me about this movie and I need to, I need to see it. I'm very excited about this filmmaker!
I think you will like it a lot. It definitely lines up with what I can see about your art and your way of approaching art. It's really good and I think you'll like it.
I am curious though, you talked a little about the radio station. So is there a physical station at the Houston location or how do some of these narratives show up in physical space?
Yeah. Right when you walk into the exhibition, you walk into the ETNL radio station and we did our best to make it as authentic as we could to the spirit and the vibe and the look of an actual community or a college station. We wanted it to feel very lived in. We wanted it to feel a little shabby, but we wanted it to feel like there are several layers of history on the wall because this radio station has been around since the 1940s. It has seen its share of people walking through the door.
Because we have so much stuff, we just have a million opportunities to tell the story. We have two full hallways that are full of framed newspaper articles that will tell you the entire history of ETNL radio station, and of Little Thicket, Texas, which is the fictional town that ETNL is originally from. We love, love, love developing the town of Little Thicket. It's another one of those things where it's like, like, okay, well, where is this place from?
When they were back on Earth, we just needed a place to say that they were from. It’s a fictional small town vibe. But then we just went all in on building out this elaborate backstory and all of these like crazy characters. We had a really, really fun time exploring the history of this little town, which is obviously not a town that you can physically see in the exhibition, but you can learn all about it by reading the newspaper articles on the wall. Our characters will also talk about it. We have them talking in lots of places, including in a bunch of DMs on all of the narrative computers, so you can read DMs between all of the characters, which is really fun. You can learn about the backstories and their interpersonal conflicts and who's got a crush on who.
Of course, the heart and soul of our story is the broadcast itself. The broadcast is something like three hours long. It features every one of our characters. It features lots of little call outs to things around our story universe, things you might have heard before, like Midnight After Dark or Skrong the Barbarian. We previewed this broadcast in Grapevine in The Real Unreal. So we have a certain subset of Superfan that was actually already familiar with these characters, which is really sweet. Then we got to build all of that out here in Houston and you can hear the broadcast in several spaces within the exhibition, as well as in the website that we created. This is a real website. It's etnl.radio. So fans can listen to the entire broadcast on that website. That really is truly the heart and soul of our story. Then kind of everything else is supporting material.
Amazing. Lastly, what do you want people to leave the exhibit with?
The backbone of this story is the friendship between these five characters. Their friendships have weathered a lot in this story. Obviously these characters have experienced something that's kind of lowkey traumatic, and they each have a very different reaction to it. Some of them are happy to be there. Some of them are desperate to go home, but they're all supporting each other through it. If you don't get anything else from this, I would like people to feel like, wow, these characters really matter to one another. They're this little found family and they have taken this really weird situation and made something really good out of it because they stayed dedicated to the radio station in the broadcast and they have stayed dedicated to each other.
And some of this is difficult. Some of them like our character, Daniel, he's our music director. He's a dad. He has two kids back at home on earth. This has been a really tough time for him, but his friends are supporting him through it. Robin, our Taver character, he's kind of got itchy feet. He feels conflicted about leaving his found family, but his friends, even though they don't really want him to go, support him… just the spirit of friendship, the spirit of supporting each other through a crisis, of finding this family when you need them is really, I think, that's what I want people to know about this story - that at its heart - is a story about friendship and found family.
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