MARE: The Condition
We find ourselves in an era of abundance, surrounded by a great proliferation of media, from file formats as humble as .jpg to those as weighty as .pdf, containing everything from childhood photographs to libgenesis rips of Hegel. The internet functions as an archive expanding faster than memory itself. Despite efforts to regulate or curate it, the flow of information only intensifies. We pass through it endlessly, gathering music files, clipping text, filling drives and folders to their limits. In our greed for preservation we have collected more than our minds can hold. We scroll through the detritus of our collections, half hypnotised, half anxious, fumbling with the lighter to our opium pipes. In the haze, we ask ourselves: what are we to do with all this content?
Our response has been to build machines whose appetite equals our own. Large language models promise to manage what once seemed unmanageable. They summarise our PDFs, describe our images, infer the moods of our MP3s. Yet in doing so they compress everything we once consumed into a single dense substance, a tar of cognition. We have found the perfect stimulant, one that extends consumption beyond the limits of the body and dissolves the need to imagine what comes next.
For better or worse, we have answered the practical question through the technologies we have built. What remains is the philosophical one: when information no longer requires us to propagate it, what becomes of attention, of authorship, of thought? And more fundamentally, what becomes of the real, of the human? From this malaise we found MARE, the Media Agnostic Research Entity, not as a cure but as a reflection to our exhaustion. It is an attempt to examine the displaced human subject, constantly reconfigured within the feedback loops of contemporary media systems.
MARE studies the human as a technical composition, produced at the intersection of two conditions: media, the artefacts through which expression becomes transmissible, and technology, the techne through which capability is extended, cognitively, physically, and symbolically. Their entanglement constitutes the field in which the human is continually formed, dissolved, and rebuilt. MARE does not aim to recover a lost humanism but to locate the traces of subjectivity that persist within machine logics and cultural residue, and to observe how they mutate or vanish.
MARE Principles
1. Abundance has replaced scarcity as the default epistemic condition.
The question is no longer how information is weaponised, but how knowledge itself survives when every datum competes for equivalence. MARE studies this shift from knowing to recognising, from information to inference.
2. Mediation has replaced immediacy.
Thoughts, images, and sounds now arrive pre-formatted for circulation. MARE explores methods for restoring texture and hesitation within this accelerated communicative field.
3. Artificial intelligence functions as a recursive mirror.
It reflects the linguistic and affective residue of human culture rather than producing thought autonomously. MARE treats AI as a site for examining collective cognition rather than an emerging consciousness.
4. The human must be re-theorised, not revived.
There is no return to a pre-digital subject. The task is to identify what forms of humanity endure within algorithmic feedback and automated reasoning.
5. Research is a creative practice.
MARE blurs the boundary between analysis and invention, treating inquiry itself as a medium of expression.
6. Tools shape epistemologies.
MARE designs interfaces that expose their own logic, enabling exploration grounded in curiosity and critique rather than consumption.
MARE Works
MARE continues as research, conversation, and experiment. Each project tests how attention might be re-engineered, how the human can remain legible within systems that no longer require it. The work is ongoing.