Chapter 1 — Beginnings
I'm Toby Godden, a writer, musician, and consciousness engineer from the Tawe Valley. My work explores what happens when story, technology, and community overlap. I call my central framework Emergy: mind over matter to the power of constant contextual change. It's a way of understanding how intention, narrative, and place can bend the reality we share.
From this seed grew the Oliverse, a participatory mythology rooted in Welsh landscapes and computational thinking.
Chapter 2 — The Oliverse
The Oliverse holds four main storylines:
- Glitchpony — Olive and her glitch-toothed pony hack reality in the Tawe Valley, told as a bilingual audio drama.
- The Two Diaries — Olive locked inside Miii's facility, fighting for the very reality we co-exist in.
- Strangeness & Charm — a London-based continuation, quantum noir in tone.
- The Synchronicity Engine — both a story and a machine I've been building for over twenty years.
Together, these works demonstrate the "literary fifth-wall break," where characters gain awareness of their fictional nature while still propelling the story forward — and in doing so, blur the line between narrative and life.
Chapter 3 — Cultural Infrastructure
I'm part of ElixirCorp CIC, a "magical corporation" experimenting with community-scale cultural infrastructure in Wales. I also work at the Literature Laboratory in Brecon, a children's bookshop with a "Time Machine" room upstairs — a space that blends books, play, and interactive technology.
These projects let me embed my ideas in real communities, not just on the page.
Chapter 4 — Applied Technologies
I treat story as research. My experiments include:
- The Synchronicity Engine — compressing information into "luck fields."
- G-luck Theory — exploring how directed attention might shift probabilities.
- Wardrobe AI — embedding advanced AI systems in inherited domestic furniture, making technology part of family story rather than corporate myth.
These prototypes sit halfway between narrative device and working technology — cultural artefacts as much as technical ones.
Chapter 5 — Production & Publishing
My creative ecosystem spans multiple companies. I run Procrastinatrix (see procrastinatrix.net), performing live electronic music and releasing through Not the Final Vinyl Ltd (NotTheFinalVinyl.net), where I serve as director.
I also revive my family's craft legacy through Rhinoceros Productions, bringing back the Puzzle Pebble from our British Toymakers Guild heritage. Alongside this, I co-authored and published How to Operate Your Human: A Manual for Existence (ffilm.org/manual), an interactive book that distils decades of consciousness field work into a usable guide.
Chapter 6 — Contact
I describe myself as an embodied post-materialist: rigorous in method, rooted in culture, open to wonder. The Oliverse is my attempt to build a living mythology for the digital age — an ecosystem where story, technology, and community intertwine.
If you'd like to collaborate, invite me to speak, or discuss projects, you can reach me here:
elixircorpenterprises@gmail.com
82 Heol Tawe, Abercrave, Swansea, SA9 1XR
Wales, UK
© Toby Godden. No cookies. No trackers.