Making Bernard Stiegler's Pharmakon seminars and courses easier to access
In 2010, Bernard Stiegler founded Pharmakon, a school of philosophy meant above all as a community of amateurs and researchers. It took its name from the Greek word that means both remedy and poison, because its task was to think about the therapies we need in the face of digital technologies. Its courses on Plato and the birth of Western philosophy, its summer academies in Épineuil-le-Fleuriel and then its seminar, which joined the Territoire apprenant contributif of Plaine Commune in 2017, were filmed for about ten years.
Since Bernard Stiegler's death in 2020, these recordings were at risk of being lost. The pharmakon.fr website was hardly maintained any more and was hard to use on mobile, while many videos were scattered on YouTube and elsewhere.
With the Épokhè association, heir to Ars Industrialis, which made it its mission to preserve these archives, we first backed up all the videos on a server, safe from the ups and downs of platforms. We then designed and developed a static website with Jekyll, where the videos are sorted chronologically and can be watched on mobile.