What begins as a detective story soon takes an unexpected turn. In From the Pocket of Agent Dickinson (Inside the Castle, 2025), Elise Houcek and Zack Darsee draw on the spy novel to explore surveillance, language, and the fragmented realities of the digital age. 

The book follows a detective investigating the disappearance of mysterious ‘lightbeings’. Documents, transcripts, screenshots, fragments of code, and shifting voices accumulate, creating a world in which certainty becomes increasingly elusive. 

Houcek and Darsee wrote the novel by alternating word by word, prompting an outcome that moves between poetry, fiction, and performance. Presented as a live reading, the audience is invited into a labyrinth of clues, interruptions, and competing narratives, asking how meaning is made in an abundance of information.

As part of the Long Night of Museums