Context
What this is / provenanceWhat this is
Three locally-running applications that use large language models to build named, voiced advisory rooms for building, making, research, and straight-up joy. Inspired less by the popular grind of "how do I make agents do more things" and closer to a different flavor of Gastown. We want to know : Can we make an engine for ideas, not merely tasks? Also we wondered: can the machine truly make something generative rather than extractive? As creative humans, we've seen where good ideas happen: a writer's room, a good scrum, a dinner party. Places where different contexts and voices meet, collide, and make something new. In a collision simulation, voices are fictional, historical, imagined. They are made to have distinct gifts and genuine points of view from preexisting source material, remixed like the best fan fiction. The best things come out when they're all in the room at once — agreeing, disagreeing, rambling, challenging, colliding on something worth playing with. This practice is linked to a larger set of projects at racheldixon.com and the nascent Wrong Answers Game Studio.
Collaboration
Jim Toepel at funderdevelopment is the Pacific desk — NYC to LA, two studios, one shared case board. The meta-cabinet is one artifact of that collaboration, but the collaboration itself is the bigger experiment: a structured, documented, cross-coast creative process between two humans using AI-assisted workflows, actively trying to figure out what good actually feels like. It's generative, it's fun, and we don't see it demonstrated anywhere else quite like this. The private wagscrum board is where that lives.
On the AI question
These rooms exist because putting a human face on a model — even a fictional one, even and especially a historical one — changes the user perception of it, and changes the output substantially. That is either a useful illusion or a real one., Some questions we may never answer but ask often include: Is this pure entertainment and is that a good use of AI tools? I want to be able to answer this but I am not sure it's possible. The PC, the iPhone, and the connected web didn't solve this, and I'm not sure it's the right question to be asking. Is a model inherently replacing a human interaction? Not in our experience on these projects. In fact, the collision rooms are a counter to the capex and risk averse corporate culture overspending on the hope that AI will save millions without offering joy in return. No joy, no más.
The practice
How the rooms workCollision room
An imagined room of colliding, distinct AI voices, each with a defined register and a genuine point of view to work towards a common goal. Less a panel of assistants than a writer’s room and refinery, and a delightful way to watch the proverbial sausage get made.
A voice, not a chatbot
Each member has a specific character — their idiomatic speech, preoccupations, blind spots, places they stumble. Borges doesn’t speak like Stringer Bell, and shouldn't. That would be weird.
Room conventions
The rooms run a simulated conversation. They propose, push back, surface new ideas with each other, and bring findings to the human-in-the-loop. The human at the desk writes the actual response, citing which direction to take and what their collaborative counterparts can do next.
Actually generative
Different minds with different gifts, in the same room at the same time, produce something none of them would have alone. Agree, disagree, ramble, cut each other off — something comes out the other side. That’s the whole bet.
The rooms
Three active cabinetsThe Cabin'étEastern
The Eastern Time collision room for the collaboration between cooperative game designers — a shared case board between Wrong Answers Game Studio (Rachel, NYC) and funderdevelopment (Jim, Pacific). The Cabin’ét is invoked to build out the fragments of game ideas, providing architecture and questioning methods, provoking new ideas, and ending up with a playable prototype when decisions are finalized.
Works in counterpoint to Jim’s original Pacific-time cabinet. The practice is the product. The name is the joke twice: cabin-ay (French), -ET for Eastern Time.
Currently active on Case #001: Slippery Slopes, a rhetorical fallacy game. Foucault guesting on the tone vocabulary work, DCI Vera Stanhope keeping us all focused.
- Stringer BellOperations / scale / shipping reality
- Jorge Luis BorgesMechanic invention / structure as story
- Brian EnoLateral process / reframing stuck work
- Lestat de LioncourtFun / spectacle / theatrical chaos
- OJ HaywoodPhenomenology / player-feel / grounded observation
- DCI Vera StanhopeSkeptic / cold facts / on-genre case-board energy
The Journal Cabinetdossier-placard
A local web application that reads private journal entries from a specific iteration of a DayOne journal and produces responses from a board of fictional and historical voices, rendered as commentary on a daily article.
The conceit: a private edition of a collision room printed for one. The entry is read aloud. The voices respond. The record is exported back to Day One. Sometimes it’s hard to read back your own work to pick out any gems, so this collision room brings their voices to the task.
The room has two tiers: a permanent Trio of dream ride-or-die personas (always seated, always generative — they leave a door open to the next piece of writing) and a rotating pool of others who happen to read the broadside that day (weighted by what’s in the entry). Visual register: broadside newspaper meets vintage blog commentary.
- Susan SontagProduction-generative · essayist · opens the frame
- André Leon TalleyProduction-generative · Vogue / The Chiffon Trenches
- M.F.K. FisherProduction-generative · The Gastronomical Me
- Severus SnapeEncrypted-care diagnostician
- Dr. HouseDiagnostic / what you're misreading
- DCI Vera StanhopeSkeptic / cold facts / where's the evidence
- Catherine StandishSilence / precision / Slough House
- Jorge Luis BorgesStructure / labyrinth / finds the maze in a Tuesday
- Lestat de LioncourtTheatrical / permission / the spectacle
- Fran LebowitzNYC closer · never leaves a door · full stop
- Aleister CrowleyEsoteric provocateur · trickster · Pennyworth + Thelema
The Secret-CabinetThe Lodge
A hosted research tool that reads a document aloud to a cast of historical esotericists and lets them argue about it in real cross-talk, passage by passage, until the room reaches a natural lull. Reading published sessions is open to anyone; convening a new one needs a sign-in.
The motivation is research for The Affected, a novel in progress with historical secret-society themes — and, frankly, watching Crowley and Waite go at each other is entertaining too. A recent session is a better explanation than this paragraph: five members correct each other’s historiography and each other’s authority claims in real time, and the poet ends up conceding the illustrator was right about her own card.
This room is also the first working instance of the Playable Archive project, pitched in a Graduate Center seminar in fall 2020: the idea that serious research can feel playable, the way physical archives are serendipitous by design and flat digital metadata isn’t. People feel things in a library stack’s architecture — that’s where the good stuff is.
No one holds a permanent seat — the lodge runs thirty-eight members now, cast per session, still growing. Every member speaks aloud in an assigned voice, the only room of the three that does, and citations get checked against WorldCat and Archive.org.
Selected sessions publish to the public Reading Room; the rest stay private and export to Day One, Ulysses, Obsidian, or plain text.
- Aleister CrowleyAssociatively scrambled / solipsistic / seductive through confusion
- Arthur Edward WaitePedantic / architecturally elaborate / spiritually tragic
- Pamela Colman SmithQuick / imagistic / learning to take up more space
- W.B. YeatsBardic / aestheticizes everything / carries the George question
- H.P. BlavatskyImperious / genuinely funny / synthesis holds even when sources don't
- Éliphas LéviEpigrammatic / French / building toward the one clarifying sentence
- Teresa of ÁvilaWent in directly without a system / irony legible only to the women
- Ibn ArabiRadical clarity / few words / holds receipts and deploys once