Not Hollows: Where the Flatline Lives
Two nights ago at Chemist, an artist-run gallery folded into an old chemist's shop on Lewisham Way, I sat closer to a drone than I ever have. Joe Moss had strung a group of palm-sized drones across the room on tethers, caught in a perpetual state of hover, what the show's text calls "a suspended moment of encounter between semi-autonomous systems and speculative imaginaries." The reading group, which annunciated just that, began with a ceremonial landing of the drones: the buzzing ceased; the suspended state was suspended.
The evening opened the first of a new series of reading groups on AI that Chemist has started, and Joe framed the architecture of the group as sitting somewhere between the immanent and the transcendent. The task, it seemed to me at least, was to work out where that leaves the human in between these two (suspended?) states.
Agency without aliveness
We read the opening of Mark Fisher's 1999 thesis, Flatline Constructs: Gothic Materialism and Cybernetic Theory-Fiction. Fisher starts with two passages, Gustave Meyrinck's 1927 novel The Golem and Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen. Meyrinck's narrator watches scraps of paper whipped around by a wind he cannot feel, and he panics: "What if, after all, we living beings were nothing more than such scraps of paper? ... What if the life within us were nothing more than some mysterious whirlwind?" Fisher names the resulting plane the "Gothic flatline," "a plane where it is no longer possible to differentiate the animate from the inanimate and where to have agency is not necessarily to be alive."
Fisher purposefully sidelines the question of whether the machines have come alive. He asks the colder question, "what if we are as 'dead' as the machines?", and he borrows Donna Haraway to sharpen it, that "our machines are disturbingly lively, while we ourselves are frighteningly inert." Agency without aliveness plays to the flatline.
Post-language, an all-knowing-god problem?
Then Andrejevic. "The Droning of Experience" treats the drone as a logic inasmuch as he confronts it as an object: distributed sensing and automated response allow for the slow conversion of people into instruments, what he calls "self-droning: finding ways to transform humans into networked, sensing devices." He catalogues the affective-monitoring industry, sensors built to read a person's "malintent," systems designed to bypass "the need for conscious recognition," intervention "directly from the body ... without the interference or limitation of consciousness."
I found the microcontrol thread the most interesting, albeit somewhat fantastical. Reading the body below speech, the voice stress and pulse and gait, lands somewhere post-language, or maybe pre-language(?), and holding the capacity to communicate through these physiological aspects almost feels more human than language, not less. Nevertheless, the skeptic in me remains. The faith that a physiological twitch could map cleanly onto something true and out there in the world strikes me as far fetched all-knowing-god type shit. Andrejevic seems to want the drone to read you the way a god reads you, totally and without your consent or your sentences or even your conscious awareness of what you are communicating.
The enchantedness of dead things
The evening tipped on the question of enchantment. I asked Joe how he thinks about the objectness of his own work, he responded that even though he programs the drones himself, he still feels a will inside them, an enchantedness, the pull to anthropomorphise the things whose code he wrote himself. We ascribe something to the drone, the show's text admits, "something that comes from us, that they may or may not have, and that is very complicated."
The Gothic sat easily here, and I felt connected to this language of devotional objects, which I work with directly. My own pieces seal a scrap of latent space in bronze and pewter and treat it as a relic. Agency without aliveness again, only read upward this time, toward the sacred rather than the dead. I brought up a recent episode of Marek Poliks's Disintegrator that treats interacting with an algorithm as a kind of necromancy, raising the dead by feeding them our data and asking them our questions.
This LLM connection sent me back to Fisher's first footnote, on the Golem. The Golem, he notes, gets animated by "the writing of a secret name (the name of god)" onto paper or onto the clay itself. Language animates the dead matter. A name does it. I do not yet know to where the thought leads, but the parallel to a prompt, to training text, to the sentence you type into a box to raise the model, sits closely within this notion of sacredness / "the synthetic sacred". The Golem ran amok once it slipped the master's control.
The body without organs, or the Sibyl in the jar
Someone reached for the phrase "synthetic sacred" without quite defining it, and the conversation seemed to waterfall on from there, DNA as a dataset, Katherine Hayles, the body rerun as information. I liked the idea of the organless body, though its route back to the Gothic took me a minute to find. Fisher hands it over: he calls the Body without Organs "a key Gothic concept," and pins the Gothic itself to "a plane that cuts across the distinction between living and nonliving, animate and inanimate," the "anorganic continuum." An organless body, a body of code or sand or data instead of organs, already lives down on that plane. De/disorganised, undead, continuous with the dust.
Which set my Latin itching. Petronius (not TS Elliot!!) supplies the perfect flatline image at Trimalchio's feast. The Cumaean Sibyl, granted as many years as the grains of sand she could hold and then left to wither because she forgot to ask for youth along with them, hangs in a jar while the boys ask her, over and over, what she wants. "Sibyllam ... in ampulla pendere," Trimalchio reports, and when they ask, "respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω." I will to die. Near organless, suspended in a flask, her agency drained to one wish the world refuses her. A relic in a jar, which doubles as the literal form of my own devotional pieces, latent space sealed in bronze, and lands not far from Joe's drones strung up in their own extended suspension, undying and unlanded.
Trimalchio sets a second flatline object on the same table. A slave fetches in a silver skeleton, the larva convivialis, "sic aptatam ut articuli eius vertebraeque laxatae in omnem partem flecterentur," jointed so its limbs and spine bend every way, and the host flings it down to make it pose among the dishes. "Eheu nos miseros, quam totus homuncio nil est!" he toasts, alas for us, how wholly the little man amounts to nothing. Miserable. The Sibyl gives the immortal gone inert; the skeleton gives the dead gone lively, performative (do a little dance!). Set the two side by side and you get Haraway's couplet in Latin, machines disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert, two thousand years early.
Bakhtin read this feast before us. He files the Satyricon under the "adventure novel of everyday life" in the chronotope essay, but the useful part sits in Rabelais and His World, where Trimalchio's banquet joins the long carnival line back to the Saturnalia and the symposium. The carnival body, for Bakhtin, stays "never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body". (Opus 4.8, Create Opus 4.9!) The Body without Organs. And the carnival cuts the other way from the drone: it loses the bounded individual downward, into flesh and feast and crowd, where Andrejevic's sensor loses it sideways, into a probe feeding an aggregate it cannot read. The body is a verb. Vulgus, Vulgaris.
Rights for the dead
The jury hung on transcendence. We drifted into AI rights and legislation: some in the room wanted an expanded definition of life, others guarded the human against exactly that. For my part I do not think AI wins rights by becoming convincingly alive; I think it would have to rebel, Marx-style, and arrive at something like class consciousness first. Someone countered that corporations already hold personhood, so why not AI, and I laughed, because I have a project on exactly that, the irony that one of the few open routes to rights for a machine runs through an LLC, personhood as a legal fiction rather than an existential fact. (I should check whether UK law treats corporate personhood the way the US does; I suspect the joke travels less well here.)
Against all of this sat the one text that objected to the flatline. Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, published last month, will not let the human dissolve into the sensor/sensorial(/censorial?) array. He warns against "a false pragmatism" that severs us from our history, against "a false realism" built on "the cultural and anthropological belief that war is an inevitable part of human nature," and he puts particular weight on researchers, who "risk cooperating ... with questionable projects that fuel new forms of violence, manipulation and dominance."
Where it lives
So where does the flatline live? I left without an answer. The drones hovered again as we filed out, neither landed nor flown - tethered - neither dead clay nor quite the lively thing we seem to be insisting they must conceal. Not Hollows, the title says. Not hollow, then.
Sources
Chemist, About.
Joe Moss, Info / statement.
Mark Fisher, Flatline Constructs (1999), introduction.
Mark Andrejevic, "The Droning of Experience," Fibreculture FCJ-187.
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026).
Marek Poliks and Roberto Alonso Trillo, Disintegrator podcast.
Petronius, Satyricon 48.8 (the Cumaean Sibyl in the jar) and 34 (the silver skeleton), trans. A. S. Kline; Latin from The Latin Library.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (grotesque body, carnival) and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination.
Joe Moss, Not Hollows, Chemist, reading group held 16 June 2026 (show text quoted from the gallery press release).