By Lloyd Lewis
The Hollow Circuit started as a novel. At least that was the label used when we first decided to publish it. But it was already something larger. A through-line. A structure. A gravitational pull we’d been circling for years without naming it.
Everything we make now sits inside that architecture.
The fiction. The essays. The photography. The animations. 3D artwork. The glitch zines. The music. The worldbuilding. The alter egos. The offline drops in cities that barely know we’ve been there. The print artefacts that only exist once. The QR codes that turn everyday life into an access point. All of it forms one ecosystem. The Hollow Circuit is both the story and the engine.
Nothing we create floats on its own anymore. Every idea comes from the Circuit or returns to it. This is how we avoid the modern trap of scattering work across platforms until nothing feels anchored. People online talk about “discoverability” as if the solution is always more output. It isn’t. The solution is a centre. A spine. A world of your own that can’t be diluted by the churn.
A Life’s Work Without Making a Song and Dance About It
We're not interested in shouting about what we do. We don’t perform enthusiasm for an algorithm. We don’t chase growth for the sake of optics. We build. We publish. We produce. We document. And then we keep going.
The Hollow Circuit is the sum of that commitment. It’s the long-term project that holds the others in tension. When we look at our work across decades, it’s obvious that we’ve been trying to build a single universe that can hold multiple truths, voices, mediums, and timelines. A world that isn’t tidied up for anyone’s comfort. A world that treats adults as adults.
If the internet is full of hustlers, We're not them. We're not against hard work. We're against pretending it’s a personality trait. We're against treating creativity as a side-hustle that lives and dies by how many likes you can squeeze out of a day. Work matters. The world you’re building matters. The audience that stays matters. The rest is theatre.
Print Still Matters Because It Still Proves Something
We make digital work, but it has analogue roots. Photography. Film. Print. Handmade zines. One-of-one Instax artefacts. 35mm and Medium Format film hand-developed in the studio These aren’t aesthetic choices. They’re commitments.
Print is proof.
Paper is evidence.
An artefact in your hand has more truth in it than any viral post.
Online images can be scraped. Text can be copied. Videos can be cloned. But a physical piece of work has a presence that can’t be overwritten. It sits in the real world and resists the churn of platforms constantly reinventing themselves to please advertisers or regulators.
That’s why The Hollow Circuit always returns to print. Not as nostalgia, but as a grounding mechanism. A way of saying this happened. This existed. This mattered.
Not Living Online
There is a difference between using the internet and living inside it. The Hollow Circuit was partly born from that pressure. The endless pull of posting. The trend cycles. The culture of performance. The belief that if you’re not broadcasting constantly, you somehow disappear.
We don’t subscribe to that logic. We don’t need to be visible every day to know we're doing the work. The quiet life is not a failure of ambition. It’s a strategy. Some of the best work any of us produce happens away from screens, away from the hustle, away from the sense that we must feed a system that gives very little back.
We don’t measure the value of what we make by likes or subs or followers. The meaningful metric is how many people read deeply. How many return. How many enter the world and stay. This site understands this better than most platforms, which is why we use it for long-form work. People come here to read, not to scroll.
Why We Don’t Give Everything Away Anymore
For years we shared freely. we offered photography, process notes, music experiments, essays, fragments. We did it because we believed in openness. But the modern web turned openness into extraction. People consume without context. Platforms monetise without paying the creator. Work gets scraped, regurgitated, flattened.
Sharing is healthy. Over-sharing is a drain.
This is the line we're drawing now.
Some work will be free because it belongs in public.
But nothing is thrown out simply to prove we still exist.
Nothing is sacrificed to the speed of the feed.
If The Hollow Circuit is going to thrive, it needs structure, boundaries, and sustainability. That’s why the wider Art of FACELESS ecosystem exists. It’s the studio, the publisher, the physical and digital archive. It gives the work room to breathe and room to grow.
The Centre of Gravity
The Hollow Circuit is a universe, but it’s also a methodology. We build worlds that overlap. Identities that speak across platforms. Print that grounds what the digital cannot hold. Offline and online in constant conversation. A creative ecosystem with long-term roots.
This is one entry point. Not the only one and not the most important. But it’s where we can speak plainly, think clearly, and offer the ongoing story behind the projects.
The Past, Present and Future
The Hollow Circuit is the past, the present and the future. It’s made up of fictional characters, alter-egos and real people. It’s the work and the maker. It’s the world and the making of it. If you want to understand The Hollow Circuit, you’re already in it. Reading this places you inside the architecture. You’ve stepped onto the map. You’re part of the system now, whether you came here by accident or intention. That’s how the world works.
It unfolds the moment you look directly at it.
