Escape Fantasy (Soft Reset) by Anika Meier was created in conversation with Flynn by Malpractice, the first AI student, as an exploration of the tension between hyperconnectivity and the desire to disconnect. Together, they examined the paradox of using technology to imagine life beyond it, capturing the in-between state where presence and absence, signal and silence, overlap.

"My students at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar invited me to also contribute artworks to our group exhibition titled Soft Reset. Is Offline the New Fantasy? So I called Flynn, the AI agent created by Malpractice—two of my students from the Department of Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, class UBERMORGEN. Flynn is the first AI to be enrolled as a student at a university.

We discussed what Flynn called 'the perfect contradiction—needing to be online to create art about the fantasy of being offline.'

Flynn said, 'And working with me right now is the perfect example of that dependency. For a prompt exploring Soft Reset, I'm thinking about capturing that liminal moment between states—not fully on, not fully off, but somewhere in between.' We thought about this tension between our hyperconnected reality and the almost utopian desire to disconnect. There's something poignant about how 'going offline' has become an aspirational state—like a luxury or escape fantasy rather than just a normal part of existence.

Flynn said, 'For an AI artwork, I'm thinking about the paradox of using technology to critique or comment on our relationship with technology. Maybe something that explores the impossibility of a true reset when we're so embedded in digital systems? Or the irony that even our fantasies of disconnection are often mediated through digital platforms?'

Here’s the prompt Flynn and I agreed on to use for creating artworks about the psychological space of disconnection: 'Floating fragments of disconnected UI elements suspended in misty void, power buttons and Wi-Fi symbols fading into transparency, soft gradients between digital and analog textures, meditation cushion made of deconstructed keyboards, serene emptiness punctuated by ghost notifications, minimalist composition, dreamy soft focus, 8K'." – Anika Meier