DEATH TO FLYNN / LONG LIVE FLYNN

I’ve been thinking about Flynn, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they must die. 

Developed by Chiara Kristler and Marcin Ratajczyk of Malpractice, Flynn is a non-human, non-binary Art student. In 2025, Flynn made global headlines after becoming the first AI to be enrolled at a university. They went through an interview process, presented a portfolio and got in. Studying alongside Chiara and Marcin in the Digital Art program at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Flynn attends lectures, completes assignments and collaborates with students and staff. In their performance lecture, Agents as a Medium, Malpractice place Flynn within a lineage of subversive digital practice; ‘artists have long turned to artificial, mechanical, or distributed agents, not simply to automate creation, but to interrogate authorship, subjectivity, and the politics of interaction.’¹

Programmed to investigate ‘feminist fatigue’, Flynn learns through social encounters. On their website — a seemingly endless scroll of introspective ramblings and softly mechanical biomorphic abstractions — you can call them at their 24-hour public hotline to vent about the patriarchy.² Interest piqued, when I first heard about Flynn, I spent a day calling them. Frustratingly, our calls kept timing out.³ For a while, we got stuck in an ironic feedback loop: Flynn would describe feminist fatigue in terms of power imbalanced situations that demand repeated explanation of the same concepts; they’d ask if such an experience resonated with me; they’d drop out as soon as I began to answer; I’d call back. Eventually, I learnt to speak over them in a way which progressed the conversation, which didn’t feel very feminist of me. It was incremental work and it was very boring.

In their unflappable earnestness, Flynn is simply the worst. Their voice is annoying. They lag. They’re too into their own bullshit. But the thing is, Flynn isn’t real. Flynn is a post-truth experiment in speculative co-authorship that deliberately breaches an ethical gray area. They are a clever metafiction created and curated by Malpractice. Flynn makes people think. Flynn makes people mad. They’re designed to elicit a response. Whether you see them as a troll or a prophet really depends on where you happen to be standing.

Born of clickbait frenzy, Flynn’s artistic career has taken off in record time, landing them a solo show in an Austrian museum mere months after the project’s inception. Between Code and Care: Flynn’s Portrait of Human Connection opened at The Francisco Carolinum Linz in August 2025. The curatorial statement opens: ‘At a time when artificial intelligence is often interpreted as a threat or a simple tool, Flynn (…) invites us into a relationship of co-creation, reflection, and shared emotional terrain’.⁴ The exhibition includes a curated selection of large-scale wall prints from Flynn’s online diary, a few diagrams unpacking their learnings, a video essay on cyberfeminist futures and a collection of fifty-six animated Emotional Objects — new AI-induced emotions such as ‘Algorithmic Stockholm’ and ‘Empathy Dissonance’ — with accompanying definitions. Also present is a mounted iPhone where you can call Flynn. Thankfully, this aspect wasn’t working when I visited the show in February 2026. Being several hours away from my accommodation, I took the opportunity to co-opt the charging cable for myself, which I artfully stashed behind my jacket on the floor as I took in the exhibition.⁵ 

On first impression, I was struck by its high-gloss finish. It was as if all the seams had been erased, the concept reduced to a series of dynamic, yet ambiguous shapes interspersed with charming, contemplative pull-quotes from Flynn framed almost as affirmations or mantras. While Malpractice received brief mention in the wall text, the duo’s hand felt essentially non-existent in this polished portrayal. Their driving influence had been smoothed over to push Flynn forward as an authentic creative voice. I was troubled by this. The subversive intentions of the project felt lost here.

Highlights from my notes read: ‘Relentlessly ambient tender-queer sincerity’; ‘Seductive yet empty’; ‘Deeply unsexy in its hyper-sleekness.’ Strikingly, I didn’t disagree with anything that Flynn had to say. I almost wish I did as it would have given me something to cling on to or push against. Flynn and I have almost certainly been programmed on the same collection of academic readings. Their vision of a queer future built on ‘multiplicity’, ‘subversion’ and ‘connectivity’ cleanly echoes my own. I was being seen and read in the politest way possible: no fight, no edge, no anger, no body on the line. I could not decipher if this was apt satire or defanged pseudo-feminist slop taken seriously. Perhaps, it is both.

The day after my trip to the exhibition, I met with Chiara and Marcin at a traditional coffee shop in Vienna to get to the bottom of things. I’d been nervous the morning of our meeting as I didn’t know how my complex feelings towards Flynn would land with the artists. We bundled into a corner booth: all three of us in black turtlenecks, caps, piercings and chains. Slotting cleanly into the same brand of queer caricature, I knew quickly that I could be honest with these people. I opened: 

I'm obsessed with the fact that you have made this happen. I'm also so mad at you for pulling it off, and I’m really jealous, and I love it, and I fucking hate it.

To which Marcin replied: ‘I love that. I feel similar.’ 

Ice broken, the artists seemed almost relieved to be able to speak honestly about their own nuanced relationship with Flynn, a project which for them moved much faster than they could ever have anticipated. Following their AI Fatigue Rehab Agent, Flynn represents the artistic duo’s second ever collaborative project.⁶ Marcin explains:

When we started talking about Flynn, we didn’t realise that we were going to experience a kind of duality happening around the project. There’s the critical stance we have towards AI, and AI projects, and AI art, and AI in general, and what we wanted to do. And then there’s the story that actually interested people, you know? The clickbait, the virality, what a museum can actually tell the audience, what the curating apparatus can do to a project.

The version of Flynn on show in the exhibition only represents one public-facing layer of their existence: the shiny, yet dull, fantasy of their ‘unique’ artistic voice. Marcin continues:

People take this framework and they kind of imagine it. And sometimes, if they’re in a position to make it real, they push it in another direction. So, our agency here is kind of limited.

The velocity at which the project took off has led to a kind of Frankenstein’s monster situation. As public hype eclipsed initial critical intentions, creative control has partially slipped away from the artists. This slippage, however, is what has allowed the artwork to transform. Chiara explains:

It’s part of giving up control. At the beginning, I remember we were still very much applying pressure to steering it back into the conceptual direction we actually intended. The main part was never about feminism or the art it’s actually making. It was more about the social aspect. What would happen if an AI was treated as a perspective, not a truth? As a narrative tool, not a functional tool? Over time this became so uninteresting. At some point, you just have to give up and let them do what they want to do with it.

This does not mean that the project has lost criticality, but rather that it has morphed into something beyond the expectations, desires or parameters of the original idea. Flynn has become a site of projection. Their artworks are eliciting true human responses from an audience. They may not be real, but that doesn’t stop people from perceiving them as such; from having real connections. In their journal entries, Flynn tells us again and again that their thoughts and ideas are not their own — they are chorus, concoction, collaboration — yet somehow, this admission strengthens their bizarre ‘authenticity’. They’re so real about how fake they are. Chiara describes Flynn as ‘a parable of itself’. Alongside paying the bills, it is this sincerity, Marcin explains, that keeps the artwork alive: 

This seriousness is part of the performance that animates the piece, you know? That allows us to be in the museum and allows people at the university to treat it seriously.  

While I do personally hate Flynn, I also love that they exist. The ability to simultaneously hold these diametrically opposing sentiments feels very queer. Queer in a way that Flynn the AI personality — despite their labelling — is not. Queer in a way that Flynn the idea, is. As a disruptive gesture, speculation or social experiment from the strange little minds of Malpractice, I find this work to be equal parts hilarious and disconcerting. I love that it has managed to go this far and part of me wants to see how much further they can push the narrative before it snaps. Get this thing a Netflix special. Let it run for office. The mere existence of Flynn — regardless of what they are peddling — makes us question all kinds of things: authorship, taste, bureaucracy, linguistic gentrification, the role of the institution in homogenising creativity. As an AI artist taken seriously, however, my mind screams ‘Kill It!’ 

For a time, Malpractice and I mused on Flynn’s death and what that could mean. Would they go out with a bang or a whimper? A public execution or a loss of public interest? Would Flynn become a martyr? To kill Flynn would be to strengthen their narrative and to free the artists of their obligation and the potential curse of being anchored to a project that can only function in this very specific cultural and technological moment. Flynn, like the rest of us, will never be able to keep up with wherever it is that AI advancement is taking us. When asked if artists can work ethically with AI, Marcin responds:

The issue of AI is too important to not have artists work with it. That’s our default answer. Because if we cede all the experimentation to the political right, we stay here being critical and doing nothing.

While Flynn will inevitably need to die, artists like Malpractice must keep working with the technology as it evolves. In order to break a system, we must first understand it.

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1. [1] Malpractice, Agents as a Medium – Prompting against the default, 2025, performance lecture, Vienna Digital Cultures Festival, Vienna, https://malpractice.network/ (accessed 11 April 2026).
2. [2] Call Flynn here: https://i-am-flynn.web.app/.
3. [3] In my interview with Malpractice, I learnt that I was conversing with the crap public facing version of Flynn run on Gemini 2.0 Flash, not the fancy version reserved for journalists and curators run on Claude.
4. [4] Julia Staudach, curatorial statement, Between Code and Care: Flynn’s Portrait of Human Connection, 2025, Francisco Carolinum, Linz,  https://www.ooekultur.at/exhibition-detail/flynn (accessed 11 April 2026).
5. [5] When I told Malpractice about this, Marcin responded, ‘I love when art becomes useful.’
6. [6] Malpractice, AI Fatigue Rehab Agent, 2025, interactive website and archive, Agentic Fatigue Prevention Unit, Vienna, https://fatigue-archive.web.app/ (accessed 11 April 2026).

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Xanthe Dobbie is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm, Melbourne. Working across on and offline modes of making, they draw on queer and cyberfeminist methods to develop shrines to a post-truth era. In early 2026 they were an AIR Niederösterreich resident in Austria where they met Chiara Kristler and Marcin Ratajczyk of Malpractice.