# The Leems Boyste

AIArtImmersive

The Leems Boyste is one of BSD XR's most distinctive and personal creative works — a world-premiere interactive AI installation co-created by BSD XR founder Daniel Blair and Keram Malicki-Sánchez, editor-in-chief of IndieGameReviewer.com, UCLA XR design instructor, and festival director of FIVARS — the Festival of International Virtual & Augmented Reality Stories. The project draws its name and its soul from _The Vertical Plane_, a book by Ken Webster documenting a series of supernatural events in 1980s England in which a school teacher allegedly received messages on his BBC Micro computer from Lukas, a man living in the 16th century — who described the glowing device in his chimney as the "Leems Boyste," Early Modern English for "box of lights." The project began as an accidental discovery: while developing a separate AI workflow, Blair found that the conversational naturalism of large language models made it feel entirely plausible — almost supernatural — that an entity from another time could be speaking through a machine. A conversation with Malicki-Sánchez, who shares a deep interest in machine learning and the paranormal, brought _The Vertical Plane_ into focus and the collaboration took shape from there. The result is an experience you perceive entirely in your mind, but communicate through a keyboard.

The physical hardware at the centre of the experience is a ClockworkPi DevTerm A-04 — a kit computer inspired by cyberdecks and retro-style computing aesthetics. Small, tactile, and deeply intentional in its form factor, the DevTerm was chosen not just for its ARM-based processing capability but for what it _looks like_ and _feels like_ to type on: a machine that could plausibly reach across time. Running on a custom AI workflow built around ChatGPT, the DevTerm serves as the medium through which players attempt to communicate with Lukas — receiving responses crafted by a carefully tuned prompt architecture designed to emulate the ghost's voice, vocabulary, and 16th-century worldview with genuine fidelity. The AI does not simply respond; it inhabits. And true to the spirit of the original Doddleston Messages — where Webster's printer produced physical transcripts of the exchanges — the DevTerm's built-in thermal printer produces a paper receipt of the conversation in period-accurate 16th-century English, giving every participant a physical artefact to take with them from the beyond.

The Leems Boyste premiered as an Official World Selection at FIVARS 2023 in Toronto — one of the most respected immersive storytelling festivals in the world, running September 15–19th in person at Studio idFK and extending online through October 3rd. Its selection at FIVARS was a natural fit: the festival, co-directed by Malicki-Sánchez, exists precisely to platform the kind of fearless, boundary-pushing work that lives at the intersection of technology, art, and human experience. The Leems Boyste is what BSD XR's studio department was created to make possible — a space within the agency for structured hacking, creative experimentation, and art that can only emerge when deep technical fluency meets genuine curiosity about the world. It is not a product, not a client deliverable, and not a demonstration of a capability someone asked for. It is proof that the same tools used to build enterprise XR solutions can be turned inward to create something strange, haunting, and deeply human.

## The Leems Boyste — System Specifications

### ClockworkPi DevTerm A-04 (Primary Hardware)

| Specification | Details |
| --- | --- |
| **Device** | ClockworkPi DevTerm A-04 |
| **Form Factor** | Retro-cyberdeck-inspired portable kit computer (A5 notebook size) |
| **CPU** | ARM64-bit Quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 1.8GHz |
| **GPU** | Mali-T720 |
| **RAM** | 2GB DDR3 |
| **Storage** | MicroSD card |
| **Display** | 6.8" IPS ultra-wide — 1280 × 480 (16:6 aspect ratio, dual VGA) |
| **Keyboard** | 65-key Clockwork physical QWERTY keyboard |
| **Input** | Mini trackball with Hall-effect sensors, gamepad arrow keys |
| **Printer** | Built-in 58mm 200dpi thermal printer |
| **OS** | ClockworkOS (Armbian/Ubuntu ARM64-based Linux) |
| **Mainboard** | ClockworkPi v3.14 |
| **Assembly** | Kit — assembled by the participant/installer |

### AI Workflow

| Component | Details |
| --- | --- |
| **AI Model** | ChatGPT (OpenAI large language model) |
| **Workflow** | Custom prompt architecture engineered to emulate Lukas |
| **Character** | Lukas — a 16th-century ghost communicating through a BBC Micro |
| **Source Material** | _The Vertical Plane_ by Ken Webster (the Doddleston Messages) |
| **Language Output** | Period-accurate Early Modern English (EModE) |
| **Physical Output** | Thermal-printed receipt of conversation in 16th-century English |
| **Interface** | Text-only keyboard input — no screen-based UI layer |
| **Experience Type** | Single-player interactive fiction / paranormal AI installation |
| **Premiere** | FIVARS 2023 — Official World Premiere Selection, Toronto |

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