Dispersion

The increasing ease of obtaining infectious biological agents will naturally lead to their public acquisition through specialized lethal biological pathogen vending machines. Although these machines will share many traits with today's typical vending devices, there will be new demands placed on them by governments and society. These systems will be required to automatically and safely cultivate, monitor, contain, package, and properly dispense lethal biological pathogens. Furthermore, the vending device must accurately record, track, and monitor the individuals using the system and observe social trends in viral demands to make long term predictions about humanity.

The Experimental Interaction Unit (EIU) has designed and constructed a fully functional system to study end user demands and hardware limitations of such inevitable future publicly available consumer bio-agent distribution mechanisms. Prior to the development of Dispersion, individual access to many of these pathogens required time-consuming ordering through government and/or research labs. Individuals needlessly waited for up to a month before obtaining their pathogens. Now, for the first time, Dispersion is able to offer almost instant access to a plentiful selection of lethal pathogens. We have begun development and testing of the system in several public venues.

In September of 1999 Dispersion made its debut in Linz, Austria. Under the guise of an art project at Ars Electronica, it operated for over two weeks. Almost immediately upon activation, questions of its public safety were raised as hundreds of small personal bio-capsules were dispensed to individuals. The contents of these capsules has never been fully disclosed. After two weeks of vending personal biological pathogens, gathering personal customer data, capturing fingerprints of thousands of individual users, collecting images, and assembling massive quantities of user preference statistics, Dispersion was quickly and quietly removed. EIU is currently in the process of analyzing this data and scouting out a new public venue. Initial data, images, and video can be found through the links above.