NIGEL. BROKEN.

A multimedia artefact from Art of Faceless

[POEM]

They stopped her PIP today. Like a switch flicked in a grey room, lightless. He felt it in the gut first — a punch without a fist.

Then the silence — not peaceful, but surgical.

She coughed once, in the other room. He didn't answer. He was watching himself from above. He was hovering, dull and drifting, like steam off a broken kettle.

No more Carer’s.

No more help.

No more line to the surface.

Just:

A wife who needs feeding.

A world that sneers at rest.

A government that has algorithms instead of eyes.

Nigel does not cry.

Nigel splits.

Nigel becomes the crack in the wall he’s been staring at for weeks.

He whispers to the damp, because the damp listens.

He plans his suicide, then shelves it, again, like old bread. Because she will need toast. And someone to help her pee.

He dies 12 times a day and resurrects for tea.

[PROSE]

Nigel isn’t a man. Nigel is an absence wearing trousers. A shape. A hum in a dark room.

We created him in pixels, but he’s not virtual. He’s more real than your newsfeed, truer than a minister’s promise. Nigel is the embodiment of a system’s violence — quiet, procedural, unrelenting. We built him in 3D, frame by frame, not as character design but as grief, rendered. Every hair in his moustache took hours. Every line in his brow was carved from our own.

Creating Nigel means sitting in the collapse. It means listening to the static buzz of state cruelty and letting it drown your sense of self. Animation doesn’t soften this. In fact, it sharpens it. It slows time. It makes suffering loopable.

When we give Nigel a voice, it costs us a little of our own. It’s a transaction. It’s an exorcism. It’s a scream made palatable by post-production.

But Nigel is not fiction. Nigel is every carer screaming into towels. Nigel is every benefit reassessment carried out by an invisible algorithm at 3AM. Nigel is every person who cannot afford to feel because someone needs him to function.

And Nigel could be you.

You don’t have to believe that. But you should be afraid of it. Because the state does not care how many people it breaks before breakfast.

[NOTES FROM ART OF FACELESS]

This piece is meant to be felt. Not dissected. Not polished for SEO. This is the blood under the nail of your welfare state.

You will soon see Nigel speak. His face will twitch in imperfect symmetry. His voice will tremble from synthetic cords. But his story? That’s real. That’s lived. That’s still happening.

We do not create Nigel for shock. We create Nigel because we are tired of pretending this isn’t happening. Because you might become him. Because we already are.

Let this hurt. Let it change you. Then tell someone else.

Nigel exists. And he’s waiting.

Poem by Lloyd Lewis.