81°N, Svalbard, July 2026
Berry Sullivan
Ceramics, walking, photography, writing — and a museum of found 8s. Research into what it means to look carefully in an age of automated perception.
I'm drawn to what happens when ancient practices collide with new ones — ceramics and neural networks; a pilgrimage route walked for a thousand years, walked again under a protocol of eleven axioms that treats every numeral 8 on a wall, a sign or a drain cover as an encounter: pause, photograph it once where it stands, never touch it, never return. The 8 Museum was built slow on purpose — a counter-gesture to machine-scale image generation, one found loop at a time, on foot, across two dozen countries, until the register passed 8,888. The ceramics demand a different kind of presence — a material that resists, glaze that surprises in the kiln, beauty that arrives precisely where the maker lost control.
Running through all of it is a sense that we may be the last generation of humanity as we know it. The work is evidence. The making is the argument.
The 8 Museum
A photographic archive of found 8s — the digit as it appears, spontaneously, in the world. Painted on walls, stamped in rust, stencilled onto footpaths. Not sought but encountered, through walking and what the method calls hachidō: the way of eight. Each photograph is almost spectacularly uninteresting. The pattern of attention is the work.
Still Warm
Animals encountered shortly after death, cameras and storage cards recently made obsolete — not collected but documented. Ontology may be flat. Ethics is not. What remains is attention without consolation.
Svalbard
A territory that keeps what it did not choose, and cannot let end. Bones that will not decompose, the world's plastic delivered by current to the emptiest beaches on Earth, and the northernmost 8s in the archive — one of them written by the ice itself.
Running Blues
Setting up conditions for glazes to overrun each other, to merge, to do something I didn't quite predict. The work is in the setup. Then you get out of the way.
Kumano Kodo
The Iseji had been walked for devotion for a thousand years before I arrived with a protocol. By the final days, the distinction had dissolved.
Trypophilia
Some people see a cluster of holes and their skin tightens. Some of us lean in. Fifty-three images from the period of AI image-making that The 8 Museum was a reply to, kept unseen for three years.
- VIIAfterberry a self designed to outlast its makerSpeculative archive
- VIIIAre You Crazy an illustrated novel, seeking a publisherWriting
- IX88KB a game in precisely 90,112 bytesPlay
- XGreen sixteen years of one colourPhotography
- XIResearch speculative museology · the thesis · papersMARes, Ionian University