If you look at my feed you may notice there are photographs of a Star Wars stormtrooper character called TK-24/7 here and there. It’s a name I came up with long ago to personalize a stormtrooper. The name itself is pretty self explanatory, it’s just a simple pun. An imperial trooper is always on duty you see, or that is how they are always portrayed in the movies and tv shows.

I took a look back and it seems the earliest use of the name TK-24/7 was on a photograph I uploaded on Flickr on May 2, 2010. It was called I Hate This Planet. It is tonally a little bit different to what the posts with TK-24/7 later evolved into.

The first one, a handheld shot taken outdoors with real sunshine. This one was kinda grim with the skeleton and the caption I Hate This Planet which suggests anxiety. The sand with these has always been a bit of a problem for me. I still haven’t found a perfect substitute for it. The stuff on this one is maize flour.

So, Tatooine was the first. It took almost a year before the name comes up in a different location. In March 10, 2011, TK-24/7 saw his first Hoth mission: Call of the Wild.

The original post with TK-24/7 first mentioned in the Hoth context is really dark, technically that is. I used a crummy laptop to edit these at the time and I regret that. Poor colour control. I’m not going all Lucas on those though, I’m not removing them, but I do make re-edits. This is a different frame too.

This first Hoth post is the one where the idea of a trooper with a name, identity and personality spending time in isolation on a frozen planet first comes up. There really isn’t a cohesive pattern in the development of the character but the essentials are present in this one.

The name TK-24/7 comes up a few times in the years to follow in different posts depicting missions mostly on Hoth. During those posts the character gradually develops an interest in arts and literature as well as the tendency to like the disassociation that comes with the long solo missions. The solitude is a recurring theme but it’s not always that. In 2014 he organizes an ice sculpture contest on Hoth and gets Darth Vader himself to judge!

The Art of the Frigid Plains of Hoth. This was a fairly out there idea, I made that wampa ice sculpture from clear resin. There are fingers missing and I made the horns from bits and pieces later, but the flaws actually work well. The sculpture isn’t perfect, it’s supposed to be made of ice and it is a really tricky material to work with. This was also a deliberate remake of that earlier Call of the Wild image. I thought they’d make a nice comparison, same setup basically but with some advancements in the way they are photographed.

In another post, a Christmas card I made, the cabin of an AT-ST walker is described as follows:

“Little known fact: The AT-ST, although quite small, was designed for more than just simple attack operations. The cabin boasted rotating chairs that could be turned into compact bunk beds. A crew of two could easily be fitted for a few days' patrol missions. A crew of one would go for a full week.

The warm and surprisingly cozy cabin of the AT-ST was not that bad. With the deadly Hoth winds howling outside, after the service hours were full for the day, TK-24/7 parked the walker, took his armor off, made some dinner and spent another evening reading a book. Yeah, these missions were the best!”

This is what TK-24/7 is about. It’s the peace and calm of the Hoth missions, the coziness of the cabin on his small AT-ST walker. There is lots to do in the limited space inside and on the outside, weather and mission directives permitting. This isn’t about dullness or sensory deprivation, it’s mostly just about peace of mind. And about the fact that I find the concept of a solitary person alone on an entire planet rather hilarious and entertaining.

While most of the TK-24/7 photographs are made with snow there are several set on sandy locations as well. Also indoors. I just love this Mos Eisley Cantina set.

The solitude is not the only defining characteristic of TK-24/7. He is okay with crowds as well, as seen in this one. The Garindan Gambit from 2022.
TK-24/7 even has friends, as this one from a few days ago shows, fellow troopers from the arctic unit. (On a sidenote, I seem to have lost the original file for this particular photograph. Only this JPG remains on my computer HD. The last time this happened was in 2013. Weird.)
The Nature of Creativity. There are encounters with local residents but with nobody else around they seem to go by peacefully.

Much of the story of TK-24/7’s adventures are on the short texts written for the Flickr posts. This one is no exception. Here is a link to the Nature of Creativity post but I’ll copy it here as well:

“There he was, building another snow lantern on planet Hoth. This one was a masterpiece, totally asymmetric, but perfect in how the snowballs were distributed along the structure. The build process was like poetry; miss a ball, and the flow falls apart. Yeah, this was perfect, a poem with lovely rough edges.

As TK-24/7 stood up to return to his cozy AT-ST walker, happy with what he had achieved, he was in for a big surprise. Between him and his walker stood a fully grown white wampa, the fiercest and most dangerous beast on the entire planet. It had appeared out of nowhere, no sound, no warning, like a ghost. Now it stood there, blocking the route to the only safe place TK-24/7 had. The seconds passing seemed to last a lifetime.

Later, back in the safety of the AT-ST walker, TK-24/7 looked up imperial reports on wampa encounters. There were only a few, none had ended well. Before TK-24/7 turned to bed, he looked down from the walker’s front window at his still flickering lantern in the night and wondered why the wampa had walked away. Was it the calming light inside the lantern? Was the beast mesmerized by the flicker?

Or maybe it had just eaten. It could be that.”

This is one of the little stories I like to write to go with the photographs. It draws a good picture of what sort of character TK-24/7 is I think. I look at these photographs with stories as very short movie scenes, or whole movies even albeit very short. Let’s put it this way: TK-24/7 is Robert DeNiro for my Martin Scorsese, Jean-Pierre Léaud for my François Truffaut, Clint Eastwood for my Sergio Leone (as seen in the Spaghetti western inspired Nature of Creativity photograph above), a tool for me to use for playing a film director of a sorts in a very, very small scale. I like it very much.

SHARE THIS:
Tags: inspirations, Lego, tk-24/7