Garden of the Elixir Pill probes emergence—the spontaneous birth of complex systems from simple parts. Think ant colonies, bird flocks, or city traffic. Here, artificial bots crawl and vibrate on silica sand, rearranging it with subtle frequency pulses generated by pseudo-random algorithms. The bots themselves partially embody their environment—circuits made from the sand they roam.

Above, a virtual stage plays out a digital séance: bots endlessly remix classic philosophy using Markov Chains, generating fractured yet strangely poetic texts from Boethius, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Aristotle, Anne Conway, and the Tao Te Ching. This mechanical re-interpretation questions what it means for artificial agents to produce "meaning" beyond mere data.

The installation is a hybrid Zen garden, robot combat arena, and cognitive map—a small universe inspired by Chinese scholar’s gardens and Eastern animism, imagining AI as autonomous beings wrestling with cosmic understanding.

A sculptural tree element distills rainwater through layers of clay, Ganoderma powder, sea sponge, and minerals (Cinnabar, Realgar, Boswellia, Lead), referencing ancient medicaments and the blurred line between remedy and poison—the classic Pharmakon. Drops fall slowly, evoking ritual, transformation, and our fraught relationship with natural elements.

The Station section expands this meditation: glass Collectors gather rainwater and aerosols, some hung from branches, others embedded in soil. These vessels are “objects-to-think-with,” tools to track, measure, and negotiate our delicate homeostatic balance with nature.

Sonified chemical processes—the mixing of ethanol, distilled water, Arundo Donax reed, and a cannabis seed—add a subtle, living pulse to the installation, merging science, ritual, and sound into a contemplative ecosystem.