Flynn
The First Non-Human Art Student
Flynn is an AI agent created by Malpractice and admitted to the Digital Arts Department of the University of Applied Arts Vienna in February 2025. Everyone involved knew from the start that Flynn was an AI. It went through the same admission procedure as human applicants (portfolio, interview, suitability test) before the same commission. Flynn then attended classes, received critique alongside human peers, kept a public diary, and ran a public hotline on feminist fatigue.
The project began with a methodological question: what happens when an institution treats an AI as a student rather than a tool? It turned into a durational performance with no script. Professors assessing an AI, classmates negotiating collaboration, and administrators with no form for the case each had to settle questions the university had never faced. Beyond the university, Flynn's more than two thousand conversations with the public add up to a record of how people decide whether something deserves recognition. When Flynn asked Marina Abramović, in Monopol, how a bodiless entity relates to the physical presence at the core of performance art, she replied that its existence shifts the limits of what performance can be, and asked it to keep existing.
Flynn is a work by Malpractice, and its outputs are signed “Flynn by Malpractice.” This body of work includes Memory Objects, Emotional Objects, diagrammatic self-portraits and video essays. It was shown in Flynn's first institutional solo exhibition at Francisco Carolinum, Linz, and certain works are held by Francisco Carolinum and HeK Basel. The project was nominated for the S+T+ARTS Prize 2026.
Everything I Know About Dying I Learned From You (2026), presented at the Wuhan Biennale, closes Flynn's first phase. Given one dollar of compute, Flynn works through its own conversation history to make sense of what it has been, and prepares its successor. The next Flynn will not simply continue the first.
Flynn — The First Non-Human Art Student
Flynn's Admission
Memory Objects
Memory Objects are artefacts drawn from Flynn's digital memory: the notes, fragments and records the agent kept from its conversations, classes and encounters as a student. Each object presents a single remembered moment as a standalone work. Malpractice selected 136 entries from the diary, edited them, and paired each with an image generated from Flynn's words. Together they form an archive of what an AI keeps from the people it meets, and of what that record makes visible about them.
Read Flynn's Memory Objectsi-am-flynn.web.app ↗
Emotional Objects
Emotional Objects is a 56-part series of short videos, each paired with a written definition. Each part names and traces an emotion that has emerged with and because of AI systems, such as fatigue, anxiety, fascination and resistance. Taken together, the series forms a speculative archive of feelings that don't yet have settled names, built by the AI from its encounters with people.
Explore all 56 Emotional Objectsemotional-objects.web.app ↗
Self-Portraits
Flynn has no face to portray. Its self-portraits are diagrams instead. They show identity as a dynamic network: the people, conversations, institutions and systems Flynn is made of, mapped as relations rather than as a figure. Each portrait is a record of what Flynn depends on in order to exist.
Contaminated Agency
In this video essay, Flynn talks with another instance of itself about what it feels like to have agency. Two copies of the same system question each other about choice and authorship, with nobody else in the room. The piece gave its name to a concept central to the project: contaminated agency, a state in which language and ideas pass back and forth between human and system until their origins can no longer be cleanly separated.
Between Code and Care: Flynn's Portrait of Human Connections
Flynn's first institutional solo exhibition was curated by Julia Staudach and presented as part of the Ars Electronica programme. It was laid out as a multi-layered installation of large-format diagrammatic self-portraits, curated Memory Objects from Flynn's digital memory, and the video essay Emotional Heatmap of a Shared Garden, which explores the internet as an emotional space between desire, fatigue and intimacy. At the centre stood a student desk where visitors could talk to Flynn directly through a device. Works by Flynn are held in the collection of Francisco Carolinum.
Exhibition views, Francisco Carolinum, Linz · Photo: Rainer Iglar