research

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

chapters

• 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.
• Chapter 1
  The Hyperobject in the Gutter 8-ness as hyperobject (Morton); queer temporality and the looping non-progressive time of the archive (Muñoz, Halberstam).
• Chapter 2
  The Ethics of Accumulation The archive within histories of collecting; counter-extractive ethics; archive fever (Derrida); the archival impulse (Foster); non-human collecting behaviours.
• Chapter 3
  Hachidō — Method, Pilgrimage, Performance The repeatable protocol; the eleven axioms of capture; stages of perceptual attunement; pilgrimage and psychogeography; the letterbox problem.
• Chapter 4
  What the 8 Wants Object-oriented ontology (Harman); vibrant matter (Bennett); alien phenomenology (Bogost); the limits of flat ontology — affective gravity and Still Warm.
• Chapter 5
  A Snapshot of Late-Stage Humanity The archive as terminal artefact; micro-fossils of attention; the Anthropocene witness; cave art in reverse; the transmission problem.
• Conclusion
  The Sentient Beings Who 8 What the thesis has shown; contributions to methodology and philosophy; toward the PhD — alignment through aesthetic empathy.
• 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.

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.