ABOUT
What to transmit? Knowledge? It is already available and objectivized on the web. Transmit it to everyone? Knowledge is already accessible to everyone. How to transmit it? Done!
Michel Serres, Thumbelina
XENOTHEKA is a digital library dedicated to architecture and the world. It is a context, a neighborhood, and a galaxy. Books inhabit XENOTHEKA, they are its actors and characters. In Xenotheka books and concepts become lively computational objects. They love, hate, and flirt. Xenotheka does not aspire to collect all the books. Not at all. XENOTHEKA is an interest, a question, and an atmosphere. XENOTHEKA is a context for communicating with unknown books. XENOTHEKA is personal and synthetic, rather than disciplinary and analytic. In XENOTHEKA many interests, and views coexist. In XENOTHEKA books start to gather, without a clear reason, but around a certain interest.
When related to ask.alice-ch3n81.net instrument and search engine, stories, dreams, and dramas around XENOTHEKA become alive. If you are interested in those intrigues, and the lives of books in XENOTHEKA, please do read a book about XENOTHEKA and its librarian Alice_ch3n81. The book itself is a Play Among Books. If you are interested in who is Alice_ch3n81 watch a talk about how to spell her name. Or if you want to enter this world and talk to Alice_ch3n81 and XENOTHEKA just ask Alice.
XENOTHEKA and ASK.ALICE_CH3N81 came out of Miro Roman‘s doctoral research carried out the chair for Digital Architectonics, at ETH in Zurich.
More related talks and objects can be found on House of Coded Objects Youtube.
At this point the question of whether the Library is infinite or of indefinite size, or whether the number of books inside it is finite or unlimited and recurring, becomes a secondary question. The true hero of the Library of Babel is not the library itself but its Reader, a new Don Quixote, on the move, adventurous, restlessly inventive, alchemically combinatory, capable of overcoming the windmills he makes rotate ad infinitum.
Umberto Eco, On Literature
XENOTHEKA began as a book-scanning activity at FCL in Singapore. What started as an effort to digitize architecture related knowledge gradually evolved into PHD and later to a broader research collaboration between House of Coded Objects, Studio Zwei, UIBK, Innsbruck (Asst. Prof. Dr. Miro Roman), 
Digital Architectonics, ITA, D-ARCH, ETH Zurich (Prof. Dr. Ludger Hovestadt), and 
History and Theory of Architecture, GTA, D-ARCH, ETH Zurich (Prof. Dr. Maarten Delbeke). Key figures in developing the conceptual framework of the XENOTHEKA library include Anneke Abhelakh, while Hao Wu and Emanuel Pulfer played an important role in its later implementation. Over time, XENOTHEKA developed from a digitization project into a synthetic and computationally navigable knowledge environment dedicated to architecture. The project has been shaped by a broader team of collaborators, including Miro Roman, Ludger Hovestadt, Maarten Delbeke, Anneke Abhelakh, Hao Wu, Emanuel Pulfer, David Roth, Frederik Kaufmann, Ralf Schweizer, Julian Holz, Heiner Averkamp, Hanna Baumann, Carmino Weber, Alisa Labrenz, Kutalmis Cagri Karbeyaz, Antonina Nikolic, Harnist Andrej, Rösch Martin, Xijie Ma, Filip Senjak, and Zeljko Dragosavac. Today, XENOTHEKA is maintained and further developed by the House of Coded Objects & studio0more under the direction of Asst. Prof. Dr. Miro Roman at Studio2, Institute Fur Gestaltung, UIBK.