research
MARes practice-led thesis, 2024–2026
thesis
The thesis situates The 8 Museum within the intersecting fields of speculative museology, object-oriented ontology, media archaeology, and queer temporality. It asks what happens when a single recurring form — a digit, a glyph, a loop — becomes the organising principle of an entire museological practice.
It proposes that the act of photographing found 8s, when sustained over time and treated with philosophical seriousness, constitutes a speculative museum: one that collects not objects but moments of encounter, preserves not artefacts but gestures of attention, and addresses itself not only to present audiences but to the uncertain intelligences — human or otherwise — that may follow us.
core research question
What does sustained curatorial encounter with found objects reveal about the limits of flat ontology — and what conceptual vocabulary emerges when aesthetic practice encounters the affective pressures that theory cannot contain?
How does the practice of collecting 8s function as a speculative museum — one that rethinks the ethics of encounter, the nature of attention, and what it means to build an archive through sustained noticing rather than extraction?
What does it mean to collect without acquiring — to preserve things through documentation rather than possession, creating a relational field that does not claim ownership?
How does the archive itself function as knowledge: not merely as a repository of data, but as a sustained demonstration of a particular way of looking, valuing, and attending?
If the 8 is treated as an autonomous object resistant to human meaning-making, what happens when it is simultaneously treated as something worthy of careful preservation and aesthetic encounter — and how are both propositions held without collapsing into contradiction?
chapters
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Introduction
From diffusion to devotion Origins of the practice in a counter-gesture to extractive AI training; the personal phenomenology of the 8; research context and questions.
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Chapter 1
Living Inside a Pattern: The Hyperobject of 8-ness The atmospheric 8; 8-ness as hyperobject (Morton); from sign to field condition; obsessive pattern recognition and the question of pathology; the loop — queer temporality and the figure of the 8 (Muñoz, Halberstam).
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Chapter 2
The Disease of the Archive: Collecting, Hoarding, and the Cabinet of 8s The Wunderkammer turned inside out; archive fever (Derrida); when collection becomes disease; the 8,888 question; collectors beyond the human; counter-extractive collection and the ethics of not-taking; the living archive.
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Chapter 3
Hachidō — Method, Pilgrimage, Performance The repeatable protocol; the eleven axioms of capture; stages of perceptual attunement; pilgrimage and psychogeography; the letterbox problem.
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Chapter 4
Objects That Withdraw: OOO, Vibrant Matter, and the Limits of Flat Ontology The withdrawn object (Harman); allure and the phenomenology of encounter; vibrant matter (Bennett); ontological discomfort and affective gravity; the photographer as object among objects; toward a post-OOO orientation.
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Chapter 5
A Snapshot of Late-Stage Humanity The archive as terminal artefact; strata — micro-fossils of attention and the Anthropocene witness; the transmission problem; the archive received; the counter-archive opens forward. With a live-demonstration addendum.
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Conclusion
The Sentient Beings Who 8 What the thesis has shown; contributions to methodology and philosophy; toward the PhD — alignment through aesthetic empathy.
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Creative Component
Four related outputs of one attentional disposition The digital archive at 8museum.com; Still Warm — the daughter practice; BerryPong — the playable portal; the northern field notes.
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Appendix
Correspondence with the Emergent Intelligence Annotated transcript of a live philosophical exchange between an AI agent and Qwen3.5-35B, exploring the thesis's alignment argument in real time.
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Appendix
Claude Plays BerryPong — Gameplay Commentary Highlights An AI plays BerryPong and discovers — through information rather than embodiment — what the game is really about.
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Appendix
The Qwen3-VL Micropoem Demonstration A contained experiment: an off-the-shelf vision-language model, unprimed and unframed, is shown a single photograph from the archive and asked for a micropoem in the practice's caption register.
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Appendix
The 8 Museum Modelfile A methodological artifact: the configuration through which local model interlocutors are prepared for sustained dialogue with the practice — read clause by clause as evidence for the transmission claim.
key theoretical frameworks
The thesis draws on hyperobject theory (Timothy Morton), object-oriented ontology (Graham Harman), vibrant materialism (Jane Bennett), media archaeology (Jussi Parikka, Wolfgang Ernst), queer temporality (José Muñoz, Jack Halberstam), speculative museology, and the AI alignment literature (Bostrom, Christian, Russell, Yudkowsky).
The practice-led methodology is situated within traditions of pilgrimage, psychogeography, and durational performance art, and engages directly with the ethical questions raised by the arrival of general artificial intelligence.
toward a phd
The MARes opens toward a proposed doctoral research project examining whether the perceptual dispositions cultivated through practices like The 8 Museum might inform the development of artificial intelligences capable of something analogous to embodied noticing — and whether an archive of human attention, offered as a gift rather than a dataset, might constitute a meaningful form of AI alignment through aesthetic empathy.
The thesis calls this 八道 / hachidō alignment: the proposition that a future intelligence which can learn to value the kind of attention that produced this archive may also learn to value the beings capable of it.