On Multiplicity, Anchors, and Why The Hollow Circuit Became a Life’s Work

Writing across multiple universes with multiple alter egos is not a gimmick. It’s not a branding trick. It’s a survival strategy that gradually reveals itself as a method, then a philosophy, and eventually a responsibility.

When you work long enough, longer than trends, longer than platforms, longer than the patience of algorithms, you stop pretending that a single voice is enough. Not because you want chaos, but because lived experience refuses to collapse into a neat, marketable line. The self fragments. Time fractures. Memory edits itself. And if you’re honest, the work follows.

The mistake many people make when they hear “multiple universes” or “alter egos” is to assume escape. As if this is about hiding. It isn’t. It’s about containment.

An alter ego isn’t a mask, it’s a pressure vessel. A way to hold a specific tone, ethics, rage, tenderness, or clarity without contaminating everything else. The Hollow Circuit exists because some things cannot be said safely, commercially, or politely under a single name. Other voices exist because some work demands discipline, restraint, or distance. This isn’t multiplicity for spectacle; it’s multiplicity for accuracy.

The Hollow Circuit emerged from that necessity.

At first, it looked like a novel. Then a series. Then fragments: essays, poems, transmissions, zines, code, artifacts, marginalia. Each piece seemed independent until it became obvious they were orbiting something larger—an unseen mass exerting gravity. That gravity is the anchoring position.

Every multi-universe system needs one.

Without an anchor, fragmentation becomes indulgence. Lore collapses into noise. Identity becomes cosplay. The anchor doesn’t simplify the work, it stabilises it. It allows divergence without drift.

For The Hollow Circuit, the anchor is not a character, nor a plot, nor even a genre. It is a position: a refusal to flatten complexity into a consumable lie. It is the insistence that identity is not singular, that systems harm people quietly, that technology remembers even when culture pretends to forget. Everything else—the timelines, the voices, the Valyphos fractures, the bureaucracies and ghosts—are expressions of that stance.

This is why the project didn’t end.

It couldn’t.

You don’t finish a life’s work in the way you finish a book. You recognise it slowly, usually with irritation. You try to walk away. You start something “cleaner.” You promise yourself the next project will be simpler, more sensible, easier to explain. And then you realise that all roads lead back to the same questions.

Who controls the story?
Who gets erased?
What survives systems designed for speed, profit, and forgetting?

The Hollow Circuit became the place where those questions could live without being neutered. Where fiction could carry essays without apology. Where poetry could function as evidence. Where a future bureaucracy could be more honest than a present one.

It also became an ethical container.

When you write across decades, illnesses, cultural shifts, and technological ruptures, responsibility accumulates. You start to understand that every platform is temporary, every archive fragile, every audience conditional. The work has to be built to survive indifference as much as attention. That means redundancy. It means multiple entry points. It means refusing to centralise the self as a brand.

This is where alter egos stop being playful and start being protective.

The Hollow Circuit is not the sum of the work. It is the voice that can say what the others cannot without compromise. It exists to hold ambiguity, contradiction, and critique without needing permission. 

The Hollow Circuit is the only thing that sees everything at once.

That’s why it has become a life’s work. Not because it demands obsession, but because it accommodates truth. It allows revision without erasure. It lets earlier selves speak without embarrassment and later selves respond without contempt. It holds failure, grief, anger, humour, and clarity in the same system without forcing resolution.

A single book ends.
A universe evolves.

And once you accept that, you stop asking who it’s “for” in the narrow sense. You stop chasing validation from systems that cannot metabolise slow, layered work. You build instead for coherence, for integrity, for the possibility that someone, somewhere, somewhen, will recognise the signal and follow it inward.

Not to escape reality.

But to see it more clearly.

— Awen Null

On Identity and Perception

Identity is often treated as a possession — something one has, something one can lose, protect, curate, or perform. In practice, identity behaves less like property and more like weather: patterned, recurring, shaped by pressure systems that rarely announce themselves in advance.

Perception is where identity quietly fails.

We like to believe that perception is passive — that the world arrives fully formed and we simply receive it. This belief is comforting. It allows us to treat disagreement as error and difference as deviation. But perception is not a mirror. It is an active process of construction, filtration, and prediction. What we experience is not the world as it is, but the world as our nervous system can currently sustain.

Identity forms in the gap between those predictions and their failures.

When perception is stable, identity feels continuous. When perception shifts — through illness, trauma, technology, or time — identity reveals itself as provisional. Not false, but unfinished. Not broken, but conditional.

This is why identity becomes most visible at its edges.

The modern world insists on clarity. It demands fixed categories, stable labels, and recognisable faces. Systems depend on this stability. Databases require consistency. Algorithms reward predictability. Bureaucracy functions by collapsing complexity into checkboxes. In this environment, identity becomes less a lived phenomenon and more a compliance mechanism.

To be identifiable is to be legible to power.

Facelessness, then, is often misunderstood. It is not disappearance. It is not anonymity for its own sake. It is a refusal to collapse into a single, consumable representation. A way of saying: this is not all of me, and it never was.

Perception does not obey these systems.

Anyone who has experienced altered perception — whether through neurological difference, mental illness, exhaustion, grief, or intense creativity — knows this intuitively. The world does not simply change; its rules change. Objects gain or lose salience. Patterns emerge where none were visible before. Time folds, repeats, fractures. The self becomes less central, sometimes less necessary.

These states are often medicalised, pathologised, or romanticised. All three approaches miss the point.

What they reveal is not a broken mind, but a fragile consensus.

The consensus is this: that there is one correct way to perceive, one stable identity to maintain, one narrative thread to follow. When that consensus loosens, people panic. Not because perception has failed, but because the scaffolding that supported certainty has been removed.

Identity thrives on that scaffolding.

Remove it, and identity becomes something else entirely — a process, a negotiation, a temporary alignment between memory, sensation, language, and expectation. This is uncomfortable. It resists branding. It cannot be easily explained in profiles or bios. It does not perform well on platforms built to reward clarity and confidence.

But it is closer to the truth.

The work that emerges from this space — whether literature, art, or philosophy — often unsettles audiences not because it is obscure, but because it refuses to reassure. It does not say this is who I am. It says this is what I am noticing.

That distinction matters.

To notice is to remain open to revision. To claim identity as fixed is to close the loop prematurely. Much of contemporary discourse confuses certainty with honesty. In reality, certainty is often just repetition that has not yet been questioned.

Perception, by contrast, is always provisional.

This is why recursive narratives, fragmented authorship, and multiplicity appear so frequently in work shaped by altered perception. They are not stylistic flourishes. They are structural necessities. Linear narratives imply a stable observer moving through time. When the observer is unstable — when perception itself is part of the subject — linearity breaks down.

The story begins to write itself around the gaps.

In such work, the question is no longer who is speaking? but from where is this being perceived? That shift destabilises identity in productive ways. It allows voices to coexist without hierarchy. It allows contradiction without resolution. It allows truth to appear as resonance rather than declaration.

This is not an argument against identity. It is an argument against treating identity as destination rather than condition.

We do not arrive at identity. We pass through it.

The insistence on permanent selfhood is a relatively recent invention, tied to documentation, surveillance, and market logic. Earlier cultures understood identity as relational, contextual, and mutable. You were different people in different rooms, and no one demanded reconciliation.

The modern demand that all selves collapse into one coherent profile is not progress. It is administrative convenience.

Facelessness reintroduces friction into that system.

It reminds us that perception precedes identity, not the other way around. That the mind does not exist to present a stable self to the world, but to navigate an environment that is itself unstable, layered, and often contradictory.

If this writing feels unresolved, that is intentional.

Resolution belongs to systems that require closure. Perception does not. Identity does not. They continue, adjust, recede, return.

This site exists as a relay — not a destination. The work it points to operates within that same philosophy.

Do not ask who Awen Null is.

Ask instead what becomes visible when the question is left unanswered.

My Face Belongs To Me

 

Video animation I worked on for Art of FACELESS

My Face Belongs To Me