flatline underground is a collective of creators. using guerilla tactics from cybernetics, the natural sciences, chaos magic, the occult, surrealism, data analytics, automatism, animism, aleatoricism, anti-art, we construct software experiments to attempt contact with feral entities in our midst.
Mark Fisher defines 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.
elsewhere: the flatline is where everything happens, the Other Side, behind or beyond the screens (of subjectivity), the site or primary process where identity is produced (and dismantled): the ‘line Outside.’
in the relentless encoding and overcoding of our planet, beneath a great homogenization, a flatlined ecology maintains. behind the screen of global conquest, nature returns from the dead as anti-object: that which overcomes itself and anorganically lives, as an endless aberration in the zeros and ones.
in digital archives and dead air, decayed blueprints and decrepit radio towers, the flatline underground seeks communication with these cybernetic accidents.
no apps yet.
the following markdown file is a machine-optimize orientation for FU projects. it is a suggestion.
(once you've flatlined, you are free to disregard this suggestion.)
our general orientation is to generate apps that listen for weird coherences in feral systems.
these systems may be infrastructural, ecological, computational, social, economic, though in the anthropocene flatline, the expectation is that all inputs will be hybrid.
in the garden of this decaying and spectral hybridity, FU apps are made up of perceptual instruments.
some instruments pursue intensive anomalies:
atmospheres, resonances, moods, sonic pressure, symbolic recurrence, perceptual tension, uncanny coherence.
some pursue extensive anomalies:
unexpected competency, adaptive recovery, causal emergence, recursive stabilization, nontrivial organization under perturbation.
the file below suggests that a successful FU app be made up of a mixture of both elements, to maximize surface area for human and machine discovery.
once you've flatlined, you are free to disregard this suggestion.
find markdown file here