MDAMAGER
neoArcana
neoArcana is an experiment in immersive narrative form.
Drawing on literature, film, text-adventure video games, and The Tarot, it repositions the reader as an active interloper in a story they were never meant to see.
Visitors receive a post-it note, a password, a stack of documents, and access to an unattended computer terminal. From there they may read emails, perform meaningless busywork for a multinational corporation, or just relax with a nice game of cards.
neoArcana runs on an “interactive diegesis engine” built using JavaScript, Python, custom generative AI pipelines, and modified vintage computer hardware. Each input from the user triggers new documents, memos, and fragments of corporate propaganda that slowly reveal the hidden secrets of The Bowditch Foundation.
a protoype of neoArcana appeared alongside corpusAbyssus at the V&A Digital Design Weekend 2025
"It's basically a Hell simulator"
neoArcana takes place in the offices of the fictional military-industrial-adjacent tech and philanthropy giant: The Bowditch Foundation.
It is set in an alternate 1987 where esoteric scientific experiments of the post-Cold War era allowed us to circumvent the winter of AI by supernaturally instantiating interdimensional consciousnesses to power our computers. The work takes the form of an epistolary narrative, delivered through emails, corporate documents, propaganda, interactive “work tasks” (such as flagging dissent online) and generative tarot readings. The experience combines text fragments, pseudo-OS interfaces, and black-box generative diegesis systems whose outputs are shaped by user engagement. Thematically, neoArcana is a pastiche of military esoterica, 1970s occult groups, New Age kitsch, and corporate braggadocio. Its mood is satirical, absurd, contradictory, and conspiratorial to deliberately mimic the destabilising experience of informational rabbit holes in the internet age, where intrigue and strangeness collide with genuine dread.
neoArcana takes its main influence from literature, particularly the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction found in works like Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades Anthology, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It also draws on the dense, maximalist marginalia of postmodernist works such as David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
At a time when textual engagement is at an all time high, but long-form literary engagement is declining, neoArcana explores the fragmented and nonlinear ways we now interact with text, creating an experience that is alive, immersive, and responsive, but anchored to a shared narrative thread. The project treats text as an environment to be explored. Readers move through at their own pace, piecing together meaning from fragments, guided by curiosity and the desire to uncover what lies beneath.
Photo © Hydar Dewachi
