Practitioner
Thomas Darknell
Writer-performer, Perspicuum Immersive Productions (San Jose, CA)
Interviewed Interviewed 2026 — recording believed lost
Works Perfection (2024) — phone-based, one-on-one, 25–35 minutes, approved applicants only
Experienced for this research Perfection, 17 July 2026, 8:30 — performed by Darknell, with a debrief call after
This page is provisional until Thomas Darknell has reviewed it for error. That undertaking was given at the outset of every interview and it stands.
The mechanism
To take part you complete an application, a waiver and an information form, which asks intimate questions about your most shameful insecurities and your proudest moments. What you write is used to personalize the call. Perspicuum does not ask participants to take a role; you are asked to be entirely yourself and let the piece find your hidden strengths and unknown weaknesses.
Why it matters to this research
The company publishes its content warnings — derogatory language, personal insults, invasive tactics, emotional manipulation, depression, adult content — and then says the thing that makes this a genuine advance: you can avoid some triggers simply by not putting certain details on the form. The participant defines, in advance and in writing, what the piece is permitted to know, and therefore what it is able to do to them.
The debrief is a live human
He performed the piece for me himself and called afterward to decompress. Set against Stepy Kamei’s Dr. Carlson, who does the same work from inside the fiction, these are the two solutions to offboarding an intense one-on-one call that this research found: a character who eases you out, or the maker stepping out of character to check on you. Both are designed. Neither is an email.
Consent as durable state
This is the only architecture I encountered all summer that solves the problem in Finding 03. Because the boundary is set before the call and holds structurally, it does not require the participant to retain anything during the experience in order to keep protecting them. The form is the durable state that a spoken in-the-moment agreement is not.