MDAMAGER - Artist / Technologist

Artist / Technologist

MDamager is an artist and technologist building interactive systems and AV installations from obsolete technologies and repurposed electronic hardware

mdamager.com

mikey@mdamager.com

+44 782587261

neoArcana

Interactive immersive literature - LLM-driven system - Python, Javascript - Salvaged and repurposed hardware

"When you join Bowditch as a Reputational Hygiene Officer, you're protecting the only version of the truth that matters..."

A hybrid physical/digital interactive literary experience that featured at the V&A Digital Design Weekend 2025, and London Games Week 2026 as well as being shortlisted for the Kitto Prize 2026

Audience members are invited to interview for a vacant role with a fictional corporation during the rollout of their latest proprietary Synthetic Reasoning technology. From there, they are free to explore a sprawling multimedia narrative through printed documents, radio broadcasts, and an unruly, tarot-reading AI chatbot who threatens to reveal the unsettling reality behind this new technology.

The installation presents contemporary generative technology alongside the material language of a re-imagined 1987. The terminal is constructed almost entirely from salvaged and second-hand hardware, consisting of stripped 1980s computers, and period correct radios, telephones, and peripherals that have been retrofitted and modified to serve new functions within the installation.

Drawing on sci-fi and cyberpunk literature, the work examines authorship, authority, and the risk of centralised technological power.

corpusAbyssus

Interactive literature - ML & LLM driven - Python, Javascript - Custom repurposed hardware

"Dear Employee, If you are reading this, then that means you have signed the appropriate contracts, and have been cleared to participate in this phase of research into the exciting new field of Computational Daemonics¹..."

An interactive installation presented at the V&A Digital Design Weekend 2025

Users encounter The TDX-7: An experimental cyberdeck housing seven interactive archetypal entities whose personalities have been generated from a corpus of over 100,000 words of the artist’s personal writing.

Built from a combination of salvaged, second hand, and contemporary components, corpusAbyssus repurposes existing and obsolete hardware into a fictional computational artefact

The work explores ideas of selfhood, memory, judgment, introspection, and autobiography, as mediated by algorithmic systems, framing machine learning as a tool for ritualised self reflection and analysis.

¹ If you have not been cleared to participate, then please close this manual and disregard what information you may have already gleaned from it.

Glorified Button Pusher

Interactive AV Installation - Text to Speech - Generative composition - Javascript, MaxMSP

Role: Artist and technologist

"Because that's what we are, aren't we? Us electronic musicians. We didn't have the talent to play a real instrument, like the trombone or the accordion, so we build our entire identities around the acquisition of high-tech magical boxes we didn't build and barely understand. We just push a few buttons, tweak a few knobs, and let a computer do all the hard work for us.”

I took the idea of my own inherent musical laziness and ran with it, or should I say sat with it, at a computer, pushing buttons by the thousands until I ended up with this thing that could push those buttons for me.

GBP listens to what you're saying, turns it into words, then words into MIDI, and loops every phrase back into an ongoing composition so you can stop pushing buttons and really focus on tweaking knobs instead.

What We Leave Behind / Where We Meet

Immersive narrative experience - generative systems - MaxMSP, Touchdesigner Role: Creative technologist

A collaborative immersive experience which ran for 8 performances in the SIML at Goldsmiths University.

Participants attempt to recover the deleted memories of a scientist using an experimental backup system, with their choices shaping a generative epilogue.

As technologist, I designed the internal networking, RFID, MIDI and OSC systems, and supervised the live operation of the installation.

Where We Meet

Immersive dance production - Spatial audio - XR/VR - Unity, Touchdesigner, MaxMSP Role: Creative technologist

An ACE-funded immersive dance production and research project combining spatial audio and XR to support audience-performer connection in immersive narrative contexts.

As technologist on this project, I developed accessibility prototypes for a dynamic text-based captioning system, supported live technical delivery, and facilitated developmental workshops for industry practitioners, public audiences, and members of the D/deaf community.

The production toured multiple venues across the UK

Selected exhibitions / Press & features

Voidspace Live - 2026 neoArcana/corpusAbyssus

London Games Week - 2026 neoArcana

Shown as part of Strange Plays Showcase

Kitto Prize - 2026 neoArcana

Shortlisted for the inaugural Kitto Prize from over 600 applicants

Tarot Futures - COLAB Tower - 2026 neoArcana

V&A Digital Design Weekend - 2025 neoArcana / CorpusAbyssus

Selected for exhibition at the V&A’s annual programme of experimental digital practice

Press & Features

Edge Magazine - Jul 2026 neoArcana

Official Raspberry Pi Magazine - Jan 2026 corpusAbyssus

Material afterlives

Obsolete technology has become an increasingly important material within my practice.

I work extensively with computational systems, and salvaged and damaged electronics, harvesting them for parts and components that can be used in new projects to give them functions beyond what they were originally designed for.

While this mostly began as a practical way of working with materials I had available, my use of old technology has become as much of an ethical and ideological stance as an aesthetic one.

Much of my current interest in E-Waste began with a simple question: Why are objects that had once been ubiquitous now so difficult and expensive to find?

CRTs and IBM-era computers are particularly stark examples. These objects were manufactured in their millions, yet surviving examples are increasingly scarce and command prices wildly disproportionate to their original value. Looking into what happened to them all led me towards the much larger problem of E-Waste, and the enormous quantities of technology that have been discarded, destroyed, or exported overseas rather than retained as a material resource.

We are surrounded by an unprecedented number of technological objects, but are given remarkably little control over whether those objects remain usable, repairable or accessible once industry decides their useful life has ended.

My practice explores ways of preserving technological material without necessarily preserving its original function.