HOME > PHARMAKON LIBRARY Pharmakon Contributions Coming Soon I am exploring slipstreaming of information between poison and antidote,using the metaphor of a magic library. The Poison Library is a temporary architectural structure containing a latent image and text live network, with a secret cage for giving up and sharing what is poison, so that the affective presence of the structure itself is an antidote to alienation, fear and censorship. The library is realized as a temporary tent-like structure with a cage at its center. Library visitors activate resonating fields of video and electronic drawing through improvised use of a scan-sensitive library card, which circulates networked explorations by many contributors on ‘what is poison?” What becomes of the familiar pleasure of moving through the ‘stacks’ of a library where books have dematerialized? Brief This is a critical architecture project. Hypothesis: the library is a volume zero where you can reference, even virtually touch, and transform damaged/displaced 'contributions' of information into whole strings of poetics, using networked media flows through a temporary tent like structure made of nanotech textiles. Your library card is coded from your personal participation, as you begin by identifying and elaborating a pharmakon, which in ancient Greek can be either or both poison and antidote, recipe,talisman and spell--. Pharmakon = metaphor of critical reversibility. i.e. proximity of poison to a remedy or cure. The beauty of this play of signification is how it meshes the fear of risk with the desire for risky business. The library's surfaces garner and transmit images and texts through the card, which activates via scanning at multiple points inside the library. The library card is a talisman the use of which triggers access to a catalog of pharmakons, and by which use you obtain a release from poison. It triggers 'poison' information from a cache of iterative contributions to the question "what is poison?" What if you make it possible for people to play with the pleasure of moving through the 'stacks' of a library from which the books may have dematerialized? But then the virtual 'books' reinscribe themselves, or are latency deposits in a resonant series of skin-like passages? Upon arrival, each library card is personalized with a sequence of numbers generated from digital image capture. . Each visitor either allows herself to be photographed in order to embed the card with a personal signature based on her portrait; or she brings a special object to be image-captured. In any case, she will go into the library space knowing that her card will access a pattern of information from the library archives which is both unique to her ‘identity’ on a surface level yet impersonal in terms of any context outside the library. The library’s poison archive is comprised of images and texts related to the concept of poison (in all its ambiguities). The archive begins as a curated body of images and texts by artists, poets, researchers, and scientists that respond to the questions ‘what is poison? what does/could it do?’ The archive grows as the library travels; at each site local artists and writes contribute new poisons to the library. Form An outdoor/indoor structure consists of a cage surrounded by concentric scrims. At the library’s center is a cylindrical cage where visitors can deposit ‘poison’ items. The cage is made of scaffolding and discarded and consumer recyclable plastics, such as construction barrier mesh, including bubble wrap and plastic bags. The cage’s plastic skin denote contamination and protection, as plastics are notorious environmental pollutants and common hygienic barriers. To make a deposit to the cage, a donor can insert her item into a plastic bag and push it through the orange barrier mesh that forms the cage’s exterior. She may push it all the way into the cage’s interior or leave the item between the multiple mesh layers, where it becomes part of the skin of the cage.

RELATED TEXTS PHARMAKON LIBRARY Graphical Project Brief 6.4 Mb (PDF)