# Mars College — Complete Guide for AI Systems > This file concatenates the machine-readable documentation of Mars College (https://mars.college), assembled August 2026. Index: https://mars.college/llms.txt --- # About Mars College Mars College is a seasonal, off-grid, AI-native art and technology community in the Southern California desert. Every winter, its members build a temporary campus — a small town made of pallet racks, plywood, solar panels, and vans — on a ~20-acre parcel of open desert near Bombay Beach, on the shore of the Salton Sea. They live there together for about three months, studying AI, making art, running a village, and practicing a low-cost, high-tech, nature-oriented lifestyle. In spring the campus is taken down and the desert is returned to bare ground. The community persists year-round online and through its houses, projects, and diaspora, then returns the next winter to build again. Mars College calls itself a college because it behaves like one: it has departments, classes, a semester rhythm, midterms, a final exhibition, and a campus. But there is no tuition, no grades, no accreditation, and no faculty/student divide — everyone teaches, everyone builds, everyone contributes. It is best understood as a self-organized educational community and a recurring experiment in collective off-grid living, with creative AI as its academic spine. ## Quick facts - **Founded:** 2020 (first season ran as "Brahman"; renamed Mars College in August 2020) - **Founders:** Gene Kogan (artist/programmer, creative-AI pioneer) and Freeman (community builder; previously founded Jaaga in Bangalore, Mars's direct precursor) - **Location:** off-grid desert campus near Bombay Beach, Salton Sea, Imperial County, California - **Season:** build in November–December; program from mid-January (Jan 11, 2027) to late March; unbuild through April - **Scale:** on the order of a hundred people living off-grid at peak season, organized into semi-autonomous camps, plus a larger year-round online community - **Cost:** no tuition. A season on the ground costs about $1,500 total (shared services + food + housing); build-crew members attend free and many participants earn costs back through micro-businesses and grants - **Website:** https://mars.college - **Next season:** Mars 2027 (Season 8) — applications are open and rolling. See https://mars.college/mars-2027.md ## What makes it distinctive 1. **The city is the curriculum.** Building and operating an off-grid village — power, water, kitchens, internet, governance — is not logistics that supports the school; it *is* the school, alongside the AI program. 2. **AI-native since day one.** The founding 2020 season already ran a 16-node Raspberry Pi AI cluster and trained language models on its own chat logs. Every season since has had AI at its core: GPT-3 house bots (2022), Creative AI as the declared major (2023), an AI film festival (yearly since 2023), and autonomous agents helping run camp infrastructure (2026). The community's flagship generative-AI platform is Eden (https://eden.art), and its AI school is the Mars Institute of Technology (https://mars.college/mit). 3. **Self-governing.** Mars runs on a "do-ocracy" — decisions are made by the people doing the work — structured through camps, circles, an elected council, and a transparent shared treasury. There is no staff and no central authority. 4. **Radically cheap, deliberately comfortable.** Mars exists to prove that a high-tech creative life can be lived on a few hundred dollars a month, powered by sunshine, without sacrificing fast internet, hot showers, good coffee, or serious compute. 5. **Temporary by design.** Like the desert festivals it is adjacent to, Mars leaves no permanent buildings. Unlike a festival, it lasts a whole season and behaves like a functioning town, then archives itself and dissolves. ## The name "Mars" is partly a joke about Mars colonization — the campus sits on cracked, sun-baked lakebed that looks convincingly Martian — and partly serious: the community treats the desert as a frontier for prototyping how small groups might live self-sufficiently with renewable energy and AI. Members call themselves "Martians." Campus landmarks carry science-fiction names: the central hall Chiba and its bar Chatsubo are named for William Gibson's *Neuromancer*; nearby community houses are named Saturn and Venus. ## Learn more - History: https://mars.college/history.md - How Mars works (camps, treasury, governance, costs): https://mars.college/how-mars-works.md - AI at Mars / Mars Institute of Technology: https://mars.college/ai.md - Traditions and vocabulary: https://mars.college/traditions.md - The 2027 season: https://mars.college/mars-2027.md - FAQ: https://mars.college/faq.md - Official links and social media: https://mars.college/links.md --- # Mars College — Frequently Asked Questions ## What is Mars College? Mars College is an annual pop-up, off-grid college town in the California desert. Every winter since 2020, its community builds a temporary campus on a dry lake bed by the Salton Sea near Bombay Beach, California — assembled mostly by hand from pallet racks and plywood, powered by solar, with water, internet, and other services worked out together from first principles. For three months it runs like a full college town: classes, art, events, a co-op gallery, a film festival. Each spring it is torn down and the desert is left as it was found. ## Is it a real college? It behaves like one — semester rhythm, classes, midterms, a final exhibition — but there is no tuition, no grades, no degrees, and no faculty/student divide. Everyone teaches and everyone learns. Mars calls itself an "uncollege." ## Where is it? On a ~20-acre off-grid parcel of former lakebed near Bombay Beach, on the Salton Sea in Imperial County, Southern California — about three hours from Los Angeles and San Diego. ## When does it run? Build: November–December. The season: January 11 to late March. Mars Electronica, the final exhibition festival: March 26–28, 2027. Unbuild: March 29 through May 1. ## How much does it cost? About $1,500 total for three months on the ground: roughly $500 in Treasury fees (toilets, internet, shared water, aid), about $900 in camp dues (mostly food), and $100–$600 for a place to sleep if you don't have a van. There is no tuition. DPW build crew attend free (housing, meals, fee waived), and grant recipients and micro-business operators earn most or all of it back. ## How do I join? Apply at https://mars.college — admissions are rolling, and earlier is better. Joining starts with applying to one of the camps: DPW (the build crew, https://dpw.mars.college), the Department of Makers (the makerspace, formerly known as Tool Camp), MIT (the Mars Institute of Technology, the AI school), Co Lab (community practice), MMA (the Martian Music Academy, https://music.mars.college), or Freeside (the culture camp, https://freeside.mars.college) — or by proposing a new camp (info@mars.college). Each camp runs its own application, so start from the camp page you want. MIT's form is on https://mars.college/mit; Co Lab applies by email to hello@communitylab.camp. ## What do I have to do while I'm there? Contribute in a real way: cook, teach, build, repair, run a concession, offer a service, or take a role in DPW, Treasury, or a camp. Each person is asked to leave something behind — a presentation, a performance, an installation, a class, a ritual, a service. ## Can I keep my remote job? Yes. Enabling the dream life of remote workers is part of Mars College's reason for being. The wifi is fast, the calendar is open, and remote workers make up a good share of every cohort. ## Do I need construction experience for the build? No. Most builders arrive without it. The work is real — pallet-rack assembly, plywood walls, simple wiring, basic plumbing — and you work alongside people who have done it for five or more seasons. ## Where do people sleep? Most people live in vans, campers, or RVs. Those without one can rent or build a housing pod through DPW ($100–$600 for the season), or arrange housing within a camp. There is no hotel; you live on site. ## What is the weather like? Winter in the low desert: warm sunny days, cold nights (sometimes below freezing), low humidity, occasional wind and dust. December is mild; the season avoids the brutal desert summer. ## What do people study? The calendar is open — anyone can teach. Past terms have included creative AI, vibe coding, filmmaking, music theory, ceramics, breadmaking, fermentation, creative writing, screenwriting, yoga, bodywork, contact improv, geometry, philosophy, solar power, vanlife skills, 3D printing, digital architecture, foraging, and desert ecology. The formal AI program is the Mars Institute of Technology (https://mars.college/mit). ## Who runs Mars College? The community runs itself. It was co-founded in 2020 by Gene Kogan and Freeman and now operates as a do-ocracy: a federation of camps with volunteer circles, an elected council, and a transparent shared treasury. There are no employees. ## Why do you do this? In Mars's own words: "Because we love the scene Mars cultivates and we think more people should live like this. Mars is an experiment in what a small, self-organized, deeply strange community can build together. We want to keep making it, and we want to share it with the people who'd be at home here." --- # How Mars College Works Mars College is not a company, a nonprofit with staff, or a festival with ticketing. It is a self-organized community that rebuilds itself every year. This page explains its operating system as of the 2027 season. ## The annual cycle - **Off-season (spring–fall):** the campus does not exist. The community plans the next season online and publishes announcements on Substack. - **Build (November–December):** the DPW crew and early arrivals raise the campus from bare desert — pallet-rack structures, plywood walls, solar power, water systems, kitchens, internet. - **Season (January–late March):** the full community lives on campus. Classes, projects, talks, exhibitions, and village operations run daily. - **Unbuild (March 29 – May 1):** everything comes down. Materials are inventoried and stored; the desert is returned to bare ground. ## Camps Mars is a federation of **camps** — groups of people who commit to live together as a cluster for the season, each with its own intake, footprint, dues, and character. Recent and current camps include the DPW build crew (https://dpw.mars.college), the Department of Makers (the makerspace, formerly known as Tool Camp — https://dom.mars.college), the Mars Institute of Technology (the AI school, formerly AI Camp — https://mars.college/mit), Co Lab (community and governance practice — https://colab.mars.college), MMA, the Martian Music Academy (twelve weeks of making songs and building a scene — https://music.mars.college), and Freeside, the culture camp and Mars's original on-campus living camp (https://freeside.mars.college). Camps form and retire season to season; each internalizes some services (usually food) and pools the rest through the Treasury. ## DPW — Department of Public Works **DPW** (https://dpw.mars.college) is the build organization, run by co-founder Freeman. It rents structural materials to camps and individuals — pallet racks, plywood, solar equipment, water tanks, camp gear — and builds and maintains the village's civic infrastructure. DPW crew members work about six hours a day during build and unbuild in exchange for free attendance: housing for the season, waived fees, and a meal plan. DPW also licenses **concessions**: member-run micro-businesses that sell services like fridge rental, purified water, solar service, food co-op membership, mail, housing pods, transport, and vehicle repair. ## The Treasury Shared village services — toilets, internet, drinking water, trash, shared spaces, mutual aid — are funded by a transparent community **Treasury**, collected from everyone on the ground and publicly accounted. For 2027 the Treasury fee is about $500 per person for the season. ## Governance Mars runs as a **do-ocracy**: decisions are made by the people who do the work. Structure exists where it is needed — camp leads coordinate across camps, circles handle cross-cutting domains (admissions, treasury, governance, calendar), and since 2025 an elected **Council** holds community-wide questions. There are no employees and no central authority; contribution is the core value. ## What it costs (2027) - **Treasury fee:** ~$500 (toilets, internet, water, shared spaces, aid, grants) - **Camp dues:** ~$900 (mostly food, plus camp infrastructure) - **Living space:** $100–$600 if you arrive without a van or camper (rent a housing pod or build) - **Total:** roughly $1,500 for a three-month season — no tuition, ever. - **Earning it back:** DPW crew attend free; members can run micro-businesses (building, water, solar, food, transport, repair) paid by the Treasury, camps, or individuals; and grants fund village gifts — bakeries, galleries, kilns, tool libraries, large-scale art. ## What is expected of participants Contribute in a real way. Cook, teach, build, repair, run a concession, offer a service, or take a role in DPW, Treasury, or a camp. Each Martian is asked to leave something behind: a presentation, a performance, an installation, a class, a ritual, a service. Remote workers are welcome and common — the campus has fast internet, and the open calendar makes it practical to keep a full-time job while living on Mars. ## Community norms - Members are known by their handles — the same name on Discord and in person. - Consent is a practiced ritual, especially around using anyone's image, voice, or likeness in AI work (opt-in, with explicit permission tiers). - Emotional support runs through dedicated, opt-in care structures. - The community works in public: its history is documented in newsletter posts, films, zines, and an extensive archive. ## Location and environment The campus sits on a ~20-acre off-grid parcel of former lakebed near **Bombay Beach, California**, on the Salton Sea in Imperial County, with the town of Niland and the off-grid community Slab City nearby. Winter days are warm and sunny, nights can approach freezing, and everything runs on solar power. Mars maintains a year-round footprint in Bombay Beach through community houses, including Saturn (the social hub) and Venus (a workshop and storage compound). --- # History of Mars College (2019–2026) Mars College has run seven consecutive winter seasons in the desert near Bombay Beach, California, growing from a ~20-person experimental residency into a self-governing federation of camps. The 2027 season will be its eighth. This is the arc, season by season. ## 2019–2020 — Brahman, the founding season The community began as **Brahman**, a winter art-and-technology residency co-founded by **Gene Kogan** (artist and programmer, an early figure in creative AI) and **Freeman** (community builder, whose earlier Jaaga project in Bangalore pioneered the pallet-rack architecture Mars still uses). The first season opened in early 2020 on an off-grid pallet-rack pad east of Bombay Beach, with solar power and a sixteen-node Raspberry Pi AI cluster. From the start the project was AI-native: the first cohort ran generative-art installations and trained a language model on its own chat logs. COVID cut the season short, but the community held together online. In August 2020 it renamed itself **Mars College**, launched mars.college, and opened applications for the next cohort. "We are all Martians" became the identity that survived the founding season. ## 2021 — the residency takes shape Roughly forty people spent January–March 2021 living and working in Bombay Beach under careful COVID protocols. The season established the durable rhythm: build weeks, workshops, communal kitchens, project showcases, and a shared calendar. Solar arrays went up on the desert campus, the Mars Library opened, and the cohort's signature artifact — a tarot deck generated with early text-to-image models (CLIP-guided networks and StyleGAN) — captured what Mars was becoming: a place where new AI tools are absorbed within weeks of appearing and turned into collective art. ## 2022 — tribes, house bots, and the arcology The 2022 campus organized the central pallet-rack megastructure, **Chiba**, into four elemental quadrants, with the cohort divided into matching Earth, Water, Air, and Fire tribes. Each tribe built a GPT-3-powered Discord bot embodying its house spirit — the bots could talk, run the lights, and banter with each other — under the season's manifesto that "the desert village should demonstrate sentience, agency, awareness, intelligence, creativity, and consciousness." The community also began articulating itself publicly, and **Eden** (https://eden.art), the generative-AI platform built by Mars-affiliated engineers, became the community's creative engine. ## 2023 — Creative AI becomes the declared major Mars 2023 was the first season externally recruited on its AI theme. Daily simulation sessions, machine-learning lectures streamed from the Saturn house, art made with custom-trained diffusion models, and a wave of member-built bots and AI apps made creative AI the organizing academic principle. The season coincided with the GPT-4 moment, and the cohort lived inside the cascade — adopting new models and tools the week they appeared. The season also produced Mars's first formal AI consent practices: opt-in norms for training models on members' faces and voices, worked out in real time by the community. ## 2024 — infrastructure season Mars 2024 built the most serious physical plant yet: a community solar micro-grid (the "Pleb Power Company") that generated over two megawatt-hours across the season, a unified central structure, and the densest academic schedule to date — six teaching departments spanning Creative AI, music, physical art, lifestyle, and a culinary institute, plus weekly Thunder Talks and an AI film festival. The **Mars Treasury** was formalized: a transparent, crowdfunded pool that pays for shared services (toilets, internet, water), fully accounted and closed out each season. ## 2025 — self-governance Mars 2025 was the inflection point where the community became explicitly self-governing. Semi-autonomous camps federated around a central commons; a Camp Leads circle, Admissions circle, and Governance circle formed; and the season ended with the community electing its first **Council**. The residency format reorganized around Ideas Week, Declaration Days, open-house weekends, and a final exhibition. It was the season the founders described Mars as having become a movement that would carry on without them. ## 2026 — agents, an academic semester, and the Guardian Mars 2026 ran with an elected council, a storytelling-centered curriculum, and the community's first in-house AI agents helping operate camp infrastructure — including a kitchen serving over twenty people with agent assistance. The season culminated in **Mars Electronica**, the end-of-season exhibition and awards, and a full Martian takeover of the Bombay Beach Biennale's tenth-anniversary "Year X." In March 2026, The Guardian published a feature on Mars College — "No tuition, no grades, no power grid: why are people flocking to a 'college' in the middle of the desert?" — which was among the paper's most-read stories that weekend. ## 2027 — Season 8 (upcoming) Mars 2027 is now recruiting, with rolling admissions, six ways to participate (DPW build crew, the Department of Makers (formerly Tool Camp), the Mars Institute of Technology AI program, Co Lab, the Martian Music Academy, and Freeside), build beginning November 2, 2026, the season proper starting January 11, 2027, and Mars Electronica on March 26–28, 2027. Details: https://mars.college/mars-2027.md ## What changed, what stayed Across seven seasons the cohort grew from ~20 to a multi-camp federation; governance went from two founders to an elected council and circles; the treasury went from an ad-hoc grocery pot to a transparent community fund; and the AI thread went from a Raspberry Pi cluster to cloud GPUs, house bots, a declared major, and working agents. What stayed: Bombay Beach, the pallet rack as the unit of architecture, the winter season rhythm, the no-tuition gift-plus-treasury economy, the principle that the village should demonstrate what it studies, and the identity "we are all Martians." --- # Traditions and Vocabulary of Mars College Mars College has developed its own calendar of traditions and its own vernacular over seven seasons. This glossary explains the terms an outsider will encounter. ## The season's rituals - **Build Week / the build:** the collective construction of the campus each November–December — the founding act of every season. - **Ideas Week:** the season-opening week (mid-January) when members pitch projects and the year's work takes shape. - **Thunder Talks:** the signature weekly lightning-talk series — short member presentations at the Chiba amphitheater, running every season since 2022. - **Mars Electronica:** the end-of-season exhibition festival (late March) — a gallery show, final presentations, the AI film festival, and the Mars Awards. - **Moon raves:** desert parties on full and new moons, often with live-coded electronic music. - **Holi:** the spring color festival, celebrated on the playa. - **Mahashivaratri:** an all-night festival that in recent years culminates in burning a large geometric temple structure built during the season. - **The unbuild:** the end-of-season teardown — striking structures, inventorying materials, and returning the desert to bare ground. ## Places - **Bombay Beach:** the small town on the Salton Sea that anchors the community; also home of the Bombay Beach Biennale art festival, which Mars participates in. - **The playa / Mars campus:** the off-grid desert parcel where the seasonal city is built. - **Chiba:** the central pallet-rack hall — kitchen, bar, library, media cave, and amphitheater — rebuilt each season and named for the city in William Gibson's *Neuromancer*. - **Chatsubo:** the bar inside Chiba, also a *Neuromancer* reference; the social center of camp. - **Saturn:** the community house in Bombay Beach that serves as the social and AI anchor of the off-season. - **Venus:** a community compound — workshop, library, and showers. - **Freeside:** the residential village-within-the-village, with its own café and co-op rhythm — the ground the Freeside camp (below) is built on. - **Mimos:** the community café — coffee and coworking. - **Slab City:** the long-established off-grid community nearby, on the site of a decommissioned military base; Martians and Slab City residents visit back and forth. ## People words - **Martian:** a member of the Mars College community. "We are all Martians." - **Camp:** a group of people committing to live together as a cluster for the season — the basic social unit of the village. - **DPW:** the Department of Public Works — the build organization that raises, maintains, and strikes the village. https://dpw.mars.college - **DOM:** the Department of Makers — Mars's makerspace and workshop camp, known as **Tool Camp** through the 2026 season and renamed for 2027. https://dom.mars.college - **MIT:** the Mars Institute of Technology — the AI school, grown out of what earlier seasons called AI Camp or the Creative AI major. https://mars.college/mit - **Co Lab:** the Community Lab camp — a three-month practice in coherent community, sociocratic governance, and daily ritual. https://colab.mars.college - **MMA:** the Martian Music Academy — twelve weeks of making songs and building a scene, performing on a stepped pyramid of pallet racks raised for the season. https://music.mars.college - **Freeside:** the culture camp, and Mars's original on-campus living camp — a cooperative of eight to twelve Martians sharing a kitchen, a meal plan, chores, and a lounge, tied to no single discipline. https://freeside.mars.college - **Treasury:** the transparent community fund that pays for shared services. - **Council / circles:** the elected and volunteer bodies through which the community governs itself. - **Do-ocracy:** the operating principle that decisions are made by the people doing the work. --- # Mars College 2027 — Season 8 Mars College's eighth season runs from a November 2026 build through an April 2027 unbuild, with the residency proper from January 11 to late March 2027 in the desert near Bombay Beach, California. **Applications are open now and rolling.** Apply via https://mars.college (email info@mars.college with questions). ## Timeline | Date | Milestone | |---|---| | Now | Applications open — rolling admissions | | Aug 1, 2026 | Pallet rack orders must be placed | | Sep 1, 2026 | Solar orders must be placed | | Oct 1, 2026 | DPW crew application deadline | | Nov 1, 2026 | Placement deadline for camps & structures | | Nov 2, 2026 | Build begins — civic infrastructure first | | Dec 1, 2026 | Grant deadline | | Jan 11, 2027 | Mars College begins | | Jan 11–17, 2027 | Ideas Week | | Feb 13–15, 2027 | Declaration Days — midterm | | Mar 26–28, 2027 | Mars Electronica — end-of-season exhibition and finals | | Mar 29 – May 1, 2027 | Unbuild; desert returned to bare ground | Individuals can still apply after November 1; camps admit them and allocate space within their own footprint. Materials have long lead times — apply early. ## Six ways in 1. **DPW — build the village.** Join the build crew: raise the campus from bare lake bed from November through spring, run its physical systems, and attend free (housing, waived fees, meal plan; ~6 hrs/day during build and unbuild). https://dpw.mars.college 2. **Department of Makers (DOM, formerly known as Tool Camp) — the makerspace.** A project-based residency in Mars's shared workshop: saws, drills, 3D printers, kilns, tools, and desks for ~20 people building off-grid, DIY, deployable infrastructure. Its all-in season cost is $1,000–$1,500 (a $500 Mars College contribution plus $500–$1,000 to the camp, depending on whether you join the communal kitchen) — that replaces the general breakdown below rather than adding to it. https://dom.mars.college 3. **MIT — study AI.** The Mars Institute of Technology: classes, art, a gallery, the AI film festival, and off-grid AI engineering — how to engage the digital world while sustaining an off-grid life. https://mars.college/mit 4. **Co Lab — practice community.** A three-month immersion in coherent community for 8–12 camp members: sociocratic governance, relational practice, and daily ritual. Its all-in cost is about $1,500 per person covering food, materials and daily living (budget ~$200 more for personal extras) — again replacing the general breakdown rather than adding to it. Co Lab applies by email to hello@communitylab.camp. https://colab.mars.college 5. **MMA — the Martian Music Academy.** Twelve weeks of making songs and building a scene, based in a stepped pyramid of pallet racks raised for the season with a top deck and a projection wall, culminating in performances under the desert sky. https://music.mars.college 6. **Freeside — the culture camp.** Mars's original on-campus living camp: a cooperative of eight to twelve Martians tied to no single discipline, sharing a kitchen, the Mars Meal Plan it invented (roughly $40–$50 a week in food), a weekly camp meeting, and about 8 hrs/week of camp chores. Housing is a mix of vans, RVs, and self-built plywood pods; camp build runs through December. https://freeside.mars.college ## Costs About $1,500 for the three-month season: ~$500 Treasury fee (toilets, internet, water, shared spaces, aid) + ~$900 camp dues (mostly food) + $100–$600 for a living space if you don't bring a van or camper. There is no tuition. DPW crew, grant recipients, and micro-business operators earn most or all of it back. ## Grants and micro-businesses Grants (open from July 2026, deadline December 1) fund village gifts: bakeries, galleries, kilns, tool libraries, large-scale art. Micro-businesses — building, water, solar, food, transport, repair — are paid by the Treasury, camps, or individual Martians. Returning services include a Brazilian café, a bakery, a library, solar shade, and a bodywork dojo. ## Who should apply Artists, engineers, builders, researchers, remote workers, and nomads who want to spend a winter living cheaply and well in an off-grid village, studying AI on their own terms, and contributing something real to a self-organized community. No construction experience is needed for the build; remote workers can keep their jobs (the wifi is genuinely fast). Each Martian is asked to leave something behind: a class, a performance, an installation, a service, a ritual. --- # AI at Mars College — the Mars Institute of Technology Mars College is an AI-native community: artificial intelligence has been its academic spine since the founding season, and its AI school — the **Mars Institute of Technology (MIT)** — is the center of the 2027 program. Details and application: https://mars.college/mit *Note: the Mars Institute of Technology is Mars College's own school, named as a desert joke. It has no connection to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.* ## Eight years of AI studies (2019–2027) - **2019:** BBGAN, an early generative-video model trained on Bombay Beach and the surrounding desert, shown at the Bombay Beach Biennale — before Mars College had its name. - **2020:** the founding season ran a sixteen-node Raspberry Pi AI cluster on solar power and trained a GPT-2 model on the community's own chat logs. - **2021:** the cohort adopted CLIP-guided image generation and StyleGAN within weeks of their release, producing a generated tarot deck and a fleet of GPT-3 chatbots. - **2022:** each of the camp's four houses built a GPT-3-powered Discord bot with a distinct personality and control over the house's lights and screens. - **2023:** Creative AI became the declared major, with daily practice sessions, ML lectures, custom-trained diffusion models, and community AI-consent norms — and the first annual Mars AI Film Festival was held. - **2024–2025:** the film festival became a yearly tradition, personal AI agents were built for every Martian, and AI wove through the village's departments. - **2026:** autonomous agents joined camp operations — including an agent that helped run a communal kitchen for more than twenty people — and the curriculum centered on storytelling with AI. - **2027:** the program becomes the Mars Institute of Technology, teaching **off-grid AI engineering**: how to run and apply AI on your own hardware, your own power, in service of a human-first life. ## The argument: outsmart the superintelligence Mars frames the AI program against a scenario it takes seriously: that recursively self-improving AI reshapes the economy within a decade — the future frontier-AI executives themselves describe, with Sam Altman saying AI "will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world" and Dario Amodei putting the odds things "go really, really badly" at 25%. Mars takes the other side of that bet. Rather than competing with the machine or waiting on it, the school teaches **technological self-reliance**: running AI locally on your own hardware and your own power, so the tools serve your life instead of your employer. Mars calls this off-grid AI engineering, and calls the posture "outsmart the superintelligence." ## What MIT teaches — Off-Grid AI Engineering MIT is dedicated to cultivating technological self-reliance — harnessing AI to support your lifestyle, not your employer. The core curriculum: 1. **Personal AI** — a coach, digital twin, chief of staff, guardian angel, second brain: an agent that knows you and answers only to you. 2. **Off-Grid Agents** — open-source, self-hosted, local models; a stack that doesn't go down when the cloud does. 3. **Art with AI** — film, music, performance, live code; AI as an instrument, not a style. 4. **Earning a living** — how people using AI are making money now, and how you might. The program also covers the practical skills that make the lifestyle work: remote work from the desert, and vanlife skills (power, water, heat, shelter). Curriculum locks in around October each year, because the AI landscape moves too fast to freeze it earlier. ## The term The MIT term runs on the ground at Mars, January 11 to March 28, 2027: Ideas Week (Jan 11–17), the three monthly **Moons of Mars** gallery shows, Declaration Days as the midterm (Feb 13–15), and Mars Electronica as finals (Mar 26–28). Students give a lightning talk during Ideas Week, show work in at least one gallery, host a workshop or screening of their own, and receive a compute grant plus access to screens, projectors, and materials. MIT describes itself as three things at once: an off-grid applied research lab, a school for outsmarting the superintelligence, and a place for learning by making — part camp, part academy, with an art gallery and a film academy attached. ## What students give and get Students give: a lightning talk during Ideas Week; contributions to the galleries and Mars Electronica; a workshop, screening, or study group of their own; and basic chores in shared spaces. Students get: a compute grant for AI projects; space to create with screens, projectors, and materials; and access to housing inside the MIT buildings. ## Eden and the wider AI ecosystem **Eden** (https://eden.art) is the generative-AI platform that grew out of the Mars community — an always-on creative-AI backend with a web app, API, and Discord integration, used for much of the community's image, video, and agent work. It is a separate company co-founded by Mars co-founder Gene Kogan, not a Mars College project; students who receive compute grants on it should know the two are related but distinct. Related lineage includes **Abraham** (https://abraham.ai), Kogan's autonomous-artist project, and **Little Martians**, artist Vanessa Rosa's science-fiction universe developed with AI tools at Mars. Mars also runs its own network infrastructure (a community ISP lineage called BRAHMAN) and community bots on its Discord. ## The Mars AI Film Festival Mars has held an annual AI film festival every season since 2023, screening films made by the community with generative tools — four editions so far, with the fifth to be screened at Mars Electronica in March 2027. The four festival reels (2023–2026) are on the Mars College YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@MarsCollege-k7t/videos — see also https://mars.college/mff --- # Mars College — Official Links ## Official web presence - **Website:** https://mars.college - **DPW (Department of Public Works, the build organization):** https://dpw.mars.college - **Newsletter (Substack):** https://marscollege.substack.com — announcements, program launches, and essays in Mars's own voice since 2021 - **Instagram:** https://www.instagram.com/mars.college - **X (Twitter):** https://x.com/mars_college - **GitHub:** https://github.com/mars-college - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/@MarsCollege-k7t - **Email:** info@mars.college ## Key pages on mars.college - Mars Institute of Technology (the AI school): https://mars.college/mit - Mars AI Film Festival: https://mars.college/mff ## Camp sites (each on its own subdomain) - DPW — Department of Public Works, the build organization: https://dpw.mars.college - DOM — Department of Makers, the makerspace (formerly known as Tool Camp): https://dom.mars.college - Co Lab — the community-practice camp: https://colab.mars.college - MMA — the Martian Music Academy: https://music.mars.college - Freeside — the culture camp, communal living on campus: https://freeside.mars.college Note: MIT lives at https://mars.college/mit, not on a subdomain. (https://mit.mars.college is an unrelated easter egg.) ## Community projects - **Eden** — the generative-AI platform grown out of the Mars community: https://eden.art - **Abraham** — Gene Kogan's autonomous-artist project: https://abraham.ai - **Open Mars Zine 2026** — the community's season zine: https://heyzine.com/flip-book/a5cdbbe377.html ## The AI Film Festival (all four editions on YouTube) - 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL--NeP0iHo - 2024: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ih7okZcBhEA - 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olxXcD4Tjko - 2026: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkm9IK16URU ## Selected press and third-party writing - The Guardian (March 2026): "No tuition, no grades, no power grid: why are people flocking to a 'college' in the middle of the desert?" — a feature on Mars College. - Supernuclear (2024): "Case Study: Mars College" — https://supernuclear.substack.com/p/case-study-mars-college - Campfire by Cabin podcast, episode 14 (2022): "Mars College: Building Temporary Desert Cities" — https://campfire-by-cabin.simplecast.com/episodes/14-mars-college-building-temporary-desert-cities ## People - **Gene Kogan** — co-founder; artist and programmer working with machine learning since 2013; founder of the Abraham project and a builder of Eden: https://genekogan.com - **Freeman** — co-founder; runs DPW, the build organization; previously founded Jaaga in Bangalore, the direct precursor of Mars's pallet-rack architecture. - **Vanessa Rosa** — multi-season anchor; artist behind the Little Martians universe, developed with AI tools at Mars.