The MARes in Hybrid Arts programme of the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University, cordially invites all interested parties to attend the public defence of the following Master’s thesis:
Thesis Title: The 8 Museum: Speculative Museology, Embodied Attention, and a Counter-Archive of Late-Stage Humanity
Candidate: Berry Sullivan
Supervisor: Dalila Honorato
Date & Time: Thursday 24 September 2026 – 18:00–19:00 Greece (09:00 Mexico City · 01:00 Sydney, 25 September)
Join via Zoom: https://ionio-gr.zoom.us/j/91258847312
Examination Committee
- Dalila Honorato — Professor, Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University
- Bill Psarras — Assistant Professor, Department of Performing and Digital Arts, University of the Peloponnese
- María Antonia González Valerio — Professor, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
About the Thesis
Can a repeated act of attention to overlooked things become a museum, and what does the attempt do to the one noticing?
The 8 Museum is a practice-led artistic research project built around walking and photographing the numeral 8 wherever it is encountered in everyday life. Across multiple countries, this sustained practice has produced an archive of more than 9,500 images, recording encounters with objects that remain in their surroundings. A number on a doorway, a worn road marking, or a discarded fragment becomes an occasion to pause, notice, and consider what makes something worthy of attention. The thesis develops this practice as hachidō—“the way of eight”—a discipline of walking, noticing, and photographic collection. Bringing speculative museology into dialogue with object-oriented ontology and media archaeology, it examines the relationship between philosophical commitments and the lived experience of encountering objects. If objects share equal standing as real things, how do we account for the unequal attention, attachment, and responsibility they evoke? Through The 8 Museum and its companion project Still Warm, Sullivan develops two concepts: ontological discomfort, naming the friction between a philosophical position and an embodied response; and affective gravity, describing how certain encounters exert a stronger pull on attention and care. These concepts emerge through artistic practice, giving language to tensions encountered in the work of collecting and curating. The museum also takes shape as a speculative counter-archive: a situated record of human attention addressed to uncertain futures and possible future readers, human or otherwise. Through photographs, curatorial decisions, and repeated encounters, the thesis asks what an archive can preserve of how someone noticed the world—and what remains beyond its capacity to hold.
Explore the project: 8museum.com
About the Candidate
Berry Sullivan is a queer artist and researcher based in Corfu, Greece, whose work spans walking, photography, writing, ceramics, and hybrid digital practice. First developed in Sydney and shaped by extended periods in Japan, Sullivan’s practice explores attention, material uncertainty, and the relationships that emerge through sustained encounters with everyday things. Projects range from functional ceramics to Still Warm, a digital cabinet of found remains, and The 8 Museum, an ongoing archive of encountered 8s. Walking connects these practices, through urban wandering, pilgrimage along Japan’s Kumano Kodo, and recent fieldwork in the High Arctic. Early experiments with generative imagery inform a continuing inquiry into the meaning of human attention in an age of automated perception. Sullivan is completing the MARes in Hybrid Arts at the Department of Audio & Visual Arts, Ionian University.
Attendance
The defence is open to the public. Students, researchers, artists, and all interested individuals are welcome to attend.
MARes in Hybrid Arts
