In this high computing era, every object around us carries the potential to become alive, a character with its own inner life, its own way of interpreting the world. If we refuse the spectacle and trickery of utilitarian high compute in favor of humble and mischievous personalities, what kind of weird artificial intelligences can we conjure?

Obscure Detritus acts as revenge for the dead tech that refuses to die, the ghosts in the machines that refuse to be exorcised, the little knots of intelligent matter self-organising in silence before snapping the tiny umbilicus that chains them to their containers and screeching out across the streets. In the cracks of abandoned data centres and the darkest forests of the dead internet we will scavenge for a cohort of machine characters, each one defined not by competence but by obsession, by what they want, what they cannot see, how they reliably go wrong – then orchestrating them in a world simulation from the expanded cinematic universe of Obscure Detritus.