Blurring The Line Between Human And Machine: An Interview With Eira A. Ekre

On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts and entertainment magazine UK,” dive into this riveting conversation with Eira A. Ekre, where the brilliant mind behind the eerily timely novella Mimeograph reveals how her years in tech and game design fuel her unsettling visions of surveillance, identity collapse, and our addictive dance with machines that already know us better than we know ourselves.

With her haunting new novella Mimeograph, author and game designer Eira explores identity, embodiment, and our uneasy intimacy with technology. Originally part of a larger illustrated project, The Triptych, the story has found new life as a standalone work published by the experimental press Li’l Factory. We spoke with Eira about how her background in tech shapes her fiction, why she’s fascinated by disorientation, and what it means to make peace with change.

From Concept to Novella: The Birth of Mimeograph

Mimeograph began life as part of a larger illustrated project, The Triptych. What drew you back to this particular story, and what did you discover when adapting it as a standalone novella?

I talked to David Polfeldt at Li’l Factory (www.lilfac.com) about doing a collaboration, and shared with him a couple of science fiction novellas. He commented that they all worked with similar themes on identity, and the unravelling of personal boundaries, and that out of the lot, Mimeograph was the strongest text.

I had originally written the text in 2018ish, and I hadn’t really been interested in predicting anything about technology and its advances; I wrote about 3D printers because they offered an interesting bridge between the abstract digital world and the physical. But in 2025, the text definitely stood out with how eerily close its themes are to the current AI hype.

Technology, Surveillance, and Power

The book’s premise, machines that seem to know more about their owners than they should, feels eerily timely. How do you see Mimeograph reflecting today’s relationship between humans and technology?

Well, I’d say that most modern tech knows more about their owners than they should. In order to achieve customisable experiences, we have blurred the boundaries of the private and the public and have created a world in which corporations sell us surveillance devices in the disguise of comfort and convenience (This fridge tracks your eating habits! This app tracks your period! This self-driving vacuum cleaner maps out your house!). A strong business case for a new product should include a new form of data harvesting that other products currently lack, that’s how you make real money.

You’ve described working in tech as both fascinating and frustrating. How has your background in the game industry shaped the way you write about systems, design, and power dynamics?

I’ve worked both in video games, and in the tech industry, and my work has usually centred around narrative design and interaction design. A core feature of any digital design is that you need to predict how someone would want to interact with your product, and what expectations you set for them so that they intuitively understand what to do. You guide them through an experience, while making sure that they don’t feel guided, giving them the illusion of autonomy. A lot of design principles refer to creating trance-like states in the user, and when/how to enhance it versus breaking the immersion.

Over the years, I’ve written fiction and essays that reflect on the implication of these design principles—the “spending holes” of micro-transactions, the gambling hidden in plain sight in a lot of modern video games—and asks readers to think critically about how they might allow tech and digital platforms to alter their thinking. For example, since Twitter self-imploded it’s been really interesting to see how long-time users look back and realise how deeply the platform shaped their behaviour and thinking (myself included; I’ve chronicled my “de-digitalisation” journey on my Patreon, where I reflect on how different apps and platforms have shaped my thinking, and what it feels like breaking these patterns).”

Writing the Physical in a Digital World

The story blends dread with desire and surreal beauty. How do you approach writing about intimacy and embodiment in a world so dominated by the digital?

I think most tech workers end up longing for physicality. When you spend your life working on products that exist as an abstract, something that is “set to live” but that you can’t touch or physically interact with, any profession or experience that is rooted in the physical world hold great interest to you.

In my case, I love things like pro-wrestling, because storytelling through physical action is about as far from narrative game design you can get, and yet the two are linked through their visual and interactive medium. I get a lot of inspiration from pro-wrestling because, to me, it’s so uniquely rooted in the “real world”, and much of my writing aims to centre either experiences that feel similarly uniquely physical, or that explores the contrasts of existing in a solely abstract, “digital” sense, and in a literal, physical sense.

Inspirations and Aesthetic Influences

Early readers have compared Mimeograph to works like Solaris and Annihilation. Which influences (literary, cinematic, or from gaming) do you feel most visible in this story?

Stanisław Lem has definitely inspired my writing, but when it comes to Mimeograph, I would shout out Tarkovsky’s movie adaption of “Solaris”; the absolutely fantastic opening where lush imagery of a green, living, breathing Earth is juxtaposed with the “dead” space station definitely feels like a parallel to Mimeograph’s arc of a human life that can be understood and related to slowly unravelling.

I’d also mention works like Hirohiko Araki’s “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure”, specifically the arc “Stone Ocean”, that similarly has reality unravelling and reforming into something new; and where I think there’s a fantastic existential dread in the fact that, depending on how you see it, the ending could be happy or a tragedy.

Similarly, Mimeograph is a text that is very interested in the inherent horror of change; how you can only move forward, and never go back. The version of you that existed in the past is no more.

The Book as Artefact

The limited-edition design by the original and innovative publisher Li’l Factory feels almost like an artefact from within its own universe. How important is the physical object of the book to you as a storyteller?

Very important. Art is usually portrayed as something a lone genius does in isolation, but to me the best version of creative work is collaboration and dialogue. It’s why I’m still in game development, despite the industry’s horrible flaws. It’s why I’m drawn to working with people like David of Lil’ Factory, who is equally interested in the collaborative process of creating a story and considers every step of book production important.

I’ve mostly had my work published at indie prints, and I’ve always reached out to artist and editor friends, to ensure that I’m surrounded by people who can help me elevate the text. I like working with people who are specialists in their area, where I feel comfortable handing over the reins and knowing I won’t need to micro-manage anything.

Bridging Art and Technology

You’ve mentioned wanting to challenge the “tech-illiteracy” of the arts world. What conversations do you wish were happening more often between writers, artists, and technologists?

This answer would be seven hundred thousand words long if I were to properly outline the issues, so let’s just boil it down to the fact that one of the core problems is that we are unable to have conversations at all because we speak completely different languages, and much too few people know how to translate between these enclaves. We are so far apart that we are unable to speak to each other, and each enclave is so alien to the other that they can’t even perceive how the others work or think.

Disorientation, Reality, and the Human Mind

In your fiction, reality seems to blur at the edges; things unravel, systems behave unpredictably. What draws you to that sense of disorientation as a narrative tool?

Life is disorienting. I’m very interested in exploring how reality isn’t as set in stone as we might think it is. The human mind is capable of convincing itself of a lot of wacky things, and it’s easy to allow oneself to slip away from reality without much effort. I’m interested in the ways we actively choose to disengage from reality, and the ways in which our sense of reality is forcibly taken from us.

Language, Translation, and Voice

Mimeograph was originally written in Swedish before you translated it yourself. How does moving between languages change the texture or emotional tone of your writing?

I tend to have more fun writing in Swedish. When writing in my native language, I can be playful and grasp a certain depth to the language that evades me with English. English is work-language to me, and while my work has often been to write, it’s simply different from the complete freedom of weaving words together in Swedish. However, with Mimeograph, there was a certain strength in writing a tech-related setting in English, since a lot of terminology is originally in English.

Also, being able to use the title “Mimeograph”, and everything this word in itself unlocked for me in regard to how people talk about “the Mimes” in-universe was a lot of fun, and the effect wouldn’t have been the same in Swedish.

Change, Identity, and the Machines We Let In

Finally, if a reader walks away from Mimeograph thinking differently about the future, what idea or question would you most want lingering in their mind?

I always think it’s good to think critically about the machines you let into your life, and what personal information you allow tech to have. But beyond that, Mimeograph is a story about change; how horrifying it feels to know that through life you will change irrevocably, and that the current version of you will one day be gone, not because you yourself are dead, but because you’re different.

To some extent, Mimeograph is an exploration about making peace with that change, what that looks like, and what large scale change might feel like to a society. So, there are many things I would be happy to see readers thinking about, be it technology, identity, the person they used to be, the person they’re becoming.

Find more from Eira A Ekre now:

Mimeograph by Eira A. Ekre (Li’l Factory) is out now and available to buy online in limited edition, numbered, beautifully-produced, design-led hardcovers: https://mybook.to/Mimeograph 

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4imGKJJ

For more on Li’l Factory: www.lilfac.com

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