I don’t even know what to call them — “immersive literature” is what I keep falling back to. They’re fully staged software‑hardware‑prop‑based experiences designed to deliver a text‑based narrative. They’re interactive, but not gamified.
This is the tension at the heart of Mikey Damager’s work. We welcome the creative technologist and self styled techno-Womble into the Voidspace to talk about the programmer as director, diagesis engines and demons.
Voidspace:
Welcome to the Voidspace.
Mikey Damager:
Thank you for having me.
Voidspace:
Before we start, I’d love it if you could tell me a bit about who you are, and the kind of work you make.
Mikey Damager:
I’m Mikey Damager. I’m an artist and technologist, and I work mostly with text and generative systems. My route into computation was making little algorithms to shuffle data so I could do other things. I started with music — making patches that generated music based on constraints, aleatoric and chance‑based tools. I’ve always made little text adventures too; I’ve always loved writing.
A few years ago, I was convinced to finally do my master’s. I applied, got in, and had to actually go. That’s when I focused my practice on computational installations — very tech‑heavy work. The pieces we’re going to talk about are NeoArcana and Corpus Abyssus.
I don’t even know what to call them — “immersive literature” is what I keep falling back to. They’re fully staged software‑hardware‑prop‑based experiences designed to deliver a text‑based narrative. They’re interactive, but not gamified.
Voidspace:
What I loved about Corpus Abyssus was how the hardware, software, the conceit, and the surrounding paper materials all worked together. To describe it: it’s a custom‑made terminal, reminiscent of the 1980s but with an eerie red glow, plus a paper user manual that took me right back to my ’90s childhood — when reading the manual was often more fun than playing the game.
Mikey Damager:
Yes, definitely. That’s a good point.
Voidspace:
It was about working your way around a parser‑style interactive fiction system to communicate with some kind of demon.
Mikey Damager:
Yes, that’s right. It was an exploration. I make a lot of cyberdecks — that’s what you’d call it.
Voidspace:
What is a cyberdeck?
Mikey Damager:
A cyberdeck — I think William Gibson coined the term in Neuromancer — comes from cyberpunk. They’re cobbled‑together computers used to “jack into” the network. Retro‑futuristic machines built from mismatched parts. I love building cyberdecks: taking old word processors or early laptops, ripping out their guts, and replacing them with something updated.
Voidspace:
So the shell — the skin — of Corpus Abyssus, was that just a word processor?
Mikey Damager:
No, that shell was a modified Amstrad PPC 640 — an old laptop from 1987.
Voidspace:
I loved it – that tiny built‑in display.
Mikey Damager:
Yeah. It has one of the most beautiful aesthetics of any laptop ever made — but it was a rubbish computer, to be honest. I did hesitate a bit about ripping its guts out because it’s quite rare now, but honestly, it wasn’t good.
Voidspace:
Did you start with the aesthetic you wanted and then look for hardware to match it? Or did the hardware come first?
Mikey Damager:
I call myself a techno‑Womble because I just Womble tech. I pick things up and think, “Could I stick a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino in this?” If the answer is yes, I keep it or acquire it somehow.
Voidspace:
Amazing. You’re Uncle Bulgaria meets William Gibson.
Mikey Damager:
That’s me. I love it. So I just end up acquiring old computer hardware — I’m always on the lookout. And then, by chance, I found a very broken Amstrad PPC 640. I took out the screen, replaced the brains, and thought, This is too cyberpunk not to use. I could have made it function as a low‑powered laptop, but it looked too cyberpunk just to watch YouTube on it.
Voidspace:
Definitely. So did you then think of a story frame to fit the hardware? Or did you already have the idea?
Mikey Damager:
I’d been building that idea for a long time — building the universe, doing little things around it. This piece pulled together a lot of that world‑building. But the direct inspiration was wanting to explore large language models and machine learning. I wanted to say, “Look, you can’t avoid AI at the moment.” I consider myself a writer, but I’m also computationally minded.
I’ve always made art with technology and with algorithms I’ve written. So the idea of algorithmically generating a new piece of art isn’t some abhorrent thing to me.
Voidspace:
That seems fair.
Mikey Damager:
I thought, I’m going to explore these systems, because I’m not going to be someone who completely shuns them. But I wanted to keep it human‑centred.
Voidspace:
Completely. This is where my ability to ask insightful questions breaks down a bit. I’m going to have to ask you to talk me through the process in layman’s terms. When people hear “large language model,” they think ChatGPT, which conjures a very specific image. But from what you said before, the artistry is in the constraints — in crafting how it thinks or computes.
Mikey Damager:
Large language models are… well, people don’t really understand them. ChatGPT is a platform built on top of an underlying model. These models are trained on massive volumes of text and are basically trained to guess which word comes next. If you give it a word or a sequence of words, it predicts the next one — or predicts a response.
The big platforms like ChatGPT use models that are also available for free — the “naked,” wide‑open versions. They’ve had no extra training beyond the base data. They’re just raw statistical averages. And you can get them in different tiers, depending on the scale of the model.
Voidspace:
When you say different tiers, do you mean how much data they’ve been fed?
Mikey Damager:
Effectively, yes — how many billions of parameters they use to infer meaning.
Voidspace:
Got you. So if it’s like playing a word‑by‑word game of charades, but within set parameters?
Mikey Damager:
It’s difficult to frame in physical language because it’s multidimensional. The way a large language model compares one piece of data to another isn’t linear.
Voidspace:
Is it to do with statistical probability? Like, if you’re trying to find the most likely word after “broken”: in a romance novel it might be “heart,” in a medical textbook “leg,” in a police report “window.” And the training parameters are the contexts that make certain outcomes more likely.
Mikey Damager:
That’s basically it. It’s the granularity of how connected each piece of data is. And it’s not just word‑by‑word — it can be sentence‑level, paragraph‑level, or even down to half a word. There’s so much going on. It’s insane. It’s a black box.
But we can run experiments to infer how the model groups information — how it makes meaning. That’s part of what I used in Corpus Abyssus.
I fed it my diaries — about 100,000 words from 15 years of writing. I gave it that and asked it to cluster sentences based on semantic similarity — what meanings the model thought they shared. Then I took those clusters and asked other LLMs to infer what “person” might have written each line.
It grouped recurring themes across my life into discrete clusters — almost like creating weighted averages of different aspects of my personality over time.
Voidspace:
So it’s massively introspective. And then — spoilers — each of those personality clusters becomes a different demon?
Mikey Damager:
Exactly. I used those clusters to build the seven personalities you can summon. They respond to the fragments in character.
Voidspace:
There’s something fascinating about users interacting with these distinct personalities when the source material is actually you.
Mikey Damager:
It is me — but mediated by a particular model. I gave it the base material, but the judgments it makes are separate.
Voidspace:
That makes sense. It’s more like you provided the ingredients, and the model cooked something with its own flavour.
Mikey Damager:
Exactly. And framing it with the user manual — as clandestine experiments from a big corporation — felt right for the world.
Voidspace:
The world‑building in that manual is fantastic. I love that you combine something cutting‑edge and high‑tech with something so low‑tech and nostalgic.
Mikey Damager:
That was exciting for me too — very child‑of‑the‑’90s energy. I’m always chasing that retro‑futurist dragon. Back then I thought, Everything’s going to be great once technology catches up.
Voidspace:
I love the interface between high‑tech and low‑tech — the paper manual alongside the complex system under the hood.
There’s something I really like about the idea that this is cross‑genre, even if maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s all writing — all creating fiction — just using different tools.
Mikey Damager:
That’s what I think is exciting. The novel has been the dominant vehicle for written narrative forever, but it doesn’t need to be. And it doesn’t have to jump straight to the sort of open world style narrative you get in many video games either.
Digital devices make it tempting to go fully nonlinear, but there’s something in‑between — something that uses both.
Voidspace:
I’m a big fan of tactility — of having a physical object in the room. And that’s where, for me, your work shades into performance, even theatre. Especially the more modern, highly interactive forms.
Now, tell us about NeoArcana. This is the piece that some of our readers will have encountered at Strange Play in April 2026 or Voidspace Live in June of the same year.
Mikey Damager:
NeoArcana is the sequel — or at least it exists in the same universe as Corpus Abyssus. If Corpus Abyssus is a prototype device created by these shadowy corporations, then Neo Arcana gives more backstory about what’s going on behind the scenes.
It’s framed as an employee terminal that has gone rogue. The company is rolling out its equivalent of AI — “synthetic reasoning.” The idea for the universe was: What if all the strange CIA experiments of the post‑Cold War era actually worked? What if the esoteric, New Age, occult‑adjacent research they dabbled in actually found something beyond the veil?
Then imagine that research being developed by the military‑industrial complex and passed on to corporations, who start using supernatural means to power computational devices. That’s the stage the universe is at.
They rolled out the demons inside Corpus Abyssus, and now they’re rolling out the domestic, commercial version — and that’s NeoArcana. And it goes a little bit wrong.
It’s an epistolary narrative told through emails and computer documents. You piece together what’s been happening inside the company.
Voidspace:
So you uncover the story by being inside the system?
Mikey Damager:
Exactly. It’s not your terminal — it belongs to a specific employee who isn’t there anymore.
Voidspace:
And you’re invited to dig around.
Mikey Damager:
Yes. There’s a post‑it note with login details. I wanted it to feel unobtrusive — just enough to tempt people in.
Voidspace:
That sounds awesome. To me, that feels like a step into theatre. I think we talked about Temping — the Fringe show where you’re put in the position of a temp for the day, interacting through a computer terminal. You piece together a narrative in real time, cast in a specific role.
Mikey Damager:
I really like that idea. Especially when you’re not being pushed to uncover a specific story — when the detachment is part of the experience.
Voidspace:
That in itself is a live‑art experience. Do you put in little nudges? Things that encourage people at intervals?
Mikey Damager:
Yes, I’ll encourage them as much as possible — not leave them completely alone. But ultimately, it’s about having a limited time to uncover information.
The company can’t appear too evil on the surface — there has to be a slow erosion of trust.
It’s something I think about in literature too — the narrator. Whoever’s narrating has to be a character, even if they’re not in the story. If the narrator isn’t situated in the universe, who are they? They’re just someone telling the story. And the reader is always in a static, passive role. I like literature that plays with that.
Voidspace:
That’s a really interesting place to put the reader — asking: Why do we have these letters? Who are we in relation to this exchange? Are we putting ourselves in the shoes of one recipient or another?
When you bring the audience in as participants, you can play with that game — and the rules of that game — in so many interesting ways. You expect the player to be affected by the tension of the setting – the fact that they are acting as an intruder discovering secrets in a space they aren’t meant to be – but they’ll also be aware they’re playing a game; engaging playfully in a fictional world.
Mikey Damager:
What I’m trying to do is establish the frame: yes, you’ve got a character in this universe, but I want to give people the freedom to be mischievous and curious. Exactly because they have to break into different parts of the system.
It’s tricky — you can’t rely on user experience or understanding if you leave too many gaps. But I want to invite people in just enough that they follow their own curiosity.
Voidspace:
You shouldn’t underestimate your audience.
In an alternate universe with infinite resources, this could be a stealth installation in an office building and you see who is curious enough – and rebellious enough – to take a peek.
Mikey Damager:
That would be the absolute dream.
The way I think I could scale it: I’ve figured out a staggering pattern. I’d need minimal personnel. You could do it with two or three people. Ideally, four terminals in four breakout rooms around a waiting room. People come in for their interview. One crew member could handle two or three machines, staggering the timing.
It would be an hour‑long experience, but really about 45 minutes: 15 minutes of onboarding, then half an hour to explore. You could set it up as a job interview, stagger people with different interviewers so they don’t realise what’s happening. They’d sit in the waiting room chatting, surrounded by company material.
Voidspace:
That would be amazing.
Mikey Damager:
It would be wonderful. People saying, “I don’t know what this interview is about,” and then being separated to do the experience.
Voidspace:
Could you rely on people to stay in character in the waiting room? There’s probably some dark corporate magic somewhere — a framework for getting people to sit in a waiting room and not talk to each other.
Mikey Damager:
It’s almost like social engineering for theatrical purposes.
Voidspace:
Absolutely. As I say, this work is absolutely theatre.
Mikey Damager:
It feels like exploring a landscape of text.
In NeoArcana, the large‑language‑model stuff works very differently. There’s a lot going on under the hood, but I’ve tried to make it so the audience can’t figure out exactly how or why their interactions matter.
The more they interact, the more it grabs hard‑coded world‑building information and uses it to generate more corporate boilerplate.
Voidspace:
That’s so exciting.
Mikey Damager:
It becomes an infinite evil world‑building engine. It keeps spitting out more, the deeper you dig. It tracks certain things so information the audience uncovers starts appearing elsewhere. If they’re paying attention, they’ll notice.
The ambience is the same for everyone, but each person gets unique storytelling beats that run parallel to the main narrative.
Voidspace:
That’s amazing. And it bumps up against the limits of my understanding — the amount of work it must take to create something that feels effortless and magical. Like any magic trick, the work is hidden.
Mikey Damager:
It’s a lot of work. Some technical challenges were difficult, but most of the work is writing. That’s what I wanted to explore with large language models — the creative difficulty is still in the writing. It’s in how I structure the prompts, how I include world‑building information that will matter later, how I truncate big pieces of information into usable chunks.
Voidspace:
And when you think about that structure, you’re thinking in narrative beats. It’s like you’re part writer, part director.
Mikey Damager:
Absolutely. It feels much more like directing. The large language model is like an improvisational actor who needs extremely detailed character profiles.
I’m constantly changing those profiles, giving it different hats, different direction sheets. I have to prepare all of that ahead of time. I’ve written easily a novel’s worth of material to feed into it.
There’s a lot of hard‑coded text available from the start — a novella’s worth that’s just mine.
Voidspace:
When you say hard‑coded, you mean not generated by the model?
Mikey Damager:
Right — not generated. Just there.
It’s a way to mad‑lib things together: grabbing sentences and fragments about the company, stitching them together, and feeding them to the model as the basis of reality. Then I say, “The company has done X, Y, Z — now generate a news article that incorporates these details.”
Voidspace:
You’re creating and directing an entire company’s worth of material.
Mikey Damager:
Totally. And I’m not advocating that one person can do the work of many — I’m saying a team could do exponentially more with these tools. You still need people with a voice and a vision.
Voidspace:
Exactly. As the disaster that was the notorious AI-written WIlly Wonka experience back in 2023 showed us, you need something decent going in to get something decent coming out.
And with all solo endeavours, you’re probably putting in more work than any one person should.
Mikey Damager:
Yes. And it’s disheartening when people say, “AI touched this, so it must be lazy.” I’m not a tech bro trying to flatten creativity.
Voidspace:
Completely. It sounds like you’re exploring world‑building at a depth and detail that wasn’t possible before.
Mikey Damager:
Absolutely. It’s a diagesis engine — that’s what I call it. I love diegetic text. I’m the guy who pauses films to read a news article that flashes by.
If it’s lorem ipsum, I’m disappointed. If it’s folded in half, I’m disappointed. I’d rather they wrote a full article and folded it in half. There’s something magical about world‑building text that someone might read.
Voidspace:
Definitely. I love a diegetic document. House of Leaves does that brilliantly.
Mikey Damager:
Yes — the gold standard.
Voidspace:
And being able to make that generative is extremely exciting. It feels like a whole new way of creating interactivity in fiction.
Mikey Damager:
Text is my favourite medium.
You can do amazing things visually, but the richest worlds are the ones we build in our heads — and text is the most efficient medium for that.
Voidspace:
Where do you hope to take this?
Mikey Damager:
I don’t have anything concrete I’m pinning my hopes on. I want to do more user testing. I’m seeking funding to show it in a few places. I want to get it out there, get feedback, and keep building.
Voidspace:
Final question: do you have any advice for aspiring creators in this field?
Mikey Damager:
I won’t give platitudes, but if you want to do it, don’t wait: get out there and do it.
Voidspace:
That’s advice I can get behind.