Mars College Mainstays Vanessa Rosa and Gene Kogan on AI Adaptation and Off-Grid Living

Mars College is an annual, off-grid, pop-up college built literally from the ground up every winter in the California desert. Located in Bombay Beach on a dry lake bed hugging the beautiful but beleaguered Salton Sea, Mars College brings together an evolving community of scientists, artists, coders, writers, futurists, builders, mathematicians, philosophers and more to push the boundaries of their respective fields, and in some instances, create entirely new ones. In the early Spring of 2025, Good Standing co-hosts Ashley & Kurt, attended the wedding of this episode's guests, Gene Kogan and Vanessa Rosa, which took place within and across several makeshift structures that comprise Mars College. Founded in 2020 by Gene Kogan and a media-shy Burning Man veteran who goes solely by "Freeman," the pop-up enclave breaks down before temperatures sky-rocket and air conditions become hostile, only to be erected once more the following winter. Gene Kogan is an artist and a programmer interested in generative systems, computer science, and software for creativity and self-expression. He is a collaborator within numerous open-source software projects, and gives workshops and lectures on topics at the intersection of code and art. In many ways, discussions of AI, now firmly in the mainstream, have only now begun to catch up with the efforts of Kogan, whose most ambitious project is Abraham, an autonomous generative "artist" tasked with creating a new work every day for 13 years. Vanessa Rosa is a Brazilian visual artist and art historian. She creates projects that mix public art, community activities, technological experiments and historical research, though in many ways, her work, which frequently includes or utilizes AI, is firmly grounded in analogue painting. Both Kogan and Rosa are at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence as it relates to creative expression, often collaborating with each other. They understand the complexities, conflicts, and implications inherent in the technology, are fascinated by the tech itself, but perhaps they are most interested in the technology's ability to push notions of intelligence itself forward. Though optimistic, they aren't glib. "Against the backdrop of impending societal collapse," the Mars College website states, "we are studying what we call 'off-grid AI engineering,' the art of being a human in an AI-dominated world."