How many installations have you encountered that have an equally inspired website? Celltexts, by Ines and Eyal Weizman, was prepared for the YOUprison exhibition at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo this past summer in Turin. This exhibit, curated by Francesco Bonami, brought together a great group of architectural studios to produce work addressing the theme of prison architecture. Other participants included Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Bernard Khoury / DWG, Atelier Bow Wow and several more gallery-friendly studios.

As an installation, Celltexts combined the space of the library and the prison cell to catalog texts and creative work produced in prison. The installation, and entire YOUprison exhibit were quite thoroughly covered in a We Make Money Not Art post from this past July, what I'm interested in discussing here is the excellent web presence of this project.

The Celltexts website is an elegant, minimal index of writing produced by incarcerated authors. What sets this library apart from others is rather than employ the Dewey Decimal System to classify texts, this collection is organized by length of prison terms (which range from 1 day to 45 years) thus "undoing systems of designated knowledge". This logic is reinforced through shelfmarks, a custom organizational system which identifies disciplines addressed by each text, notes the year the work was written, the length of prison term and the name of the author. Within the Celltexts universe, Martin Luther King Jr's Letter from Birmingham City Jail would be tagged as POLI.PHIL.1963.9D.KING.

The browser for this collection appears as a horizontal barcode and users can scroll from side to side and access information on each text. The library includes work from Antonio Negri, Mumia Abu-Jamal and even the fabled Marquis de Sade. Ines and Eyal Weizman's statement contextualizes the library in relation to space as follows:

Through the collection of texts an archipelago of prison cells emerges. The cells are thus revealed as sites of intellectual production, marking the limit condition of writing. The collection is assembled in recognition that spatial confinement and isolation may induce a process of creative, imaginative, sometimes spiritual, cultural production.

Moving through this index of texts creates an uncomfortable ambiguity between the library and the prison house.

Pictured above is the explanation for the shelfmarks system. This succinctness is echoed by the understated interface and typography making for a pretty seamless navigation experience. I'm really impressed by the precision of this project - kudos to the Celltexts website designers Polimekanos and Wolfram Wiedner.

If you'd like some additional information about Celltexts, Ines Weizman discussed the piece in an interview as part of Jackie Summel and Herman Wallace's The House that Herman Built, an undertaking also invested in exploring architecture and incarceration. [via The Complex Terrain Laboratory]