The central figure is Temperance, the virtue that mixes and moderates. In the Tarot and in the old allegories of the cardinal virtues, she pours water from one vessel into another. Here the stream falls from her open hands as two columns of green code, standing behind her like the pillars of a temple and pouring into the chalices below. One chalice is dark, with the Moon above it. The other is golden, with the Sun. They are the polar opposites found in nature, in ourselves, and in the technologies we have created, and a crescent moon beneath her feet binds them together, the same crescent the Woman of the Apocalypse stands on in colonial paintings of the Virgin. She stands on a computational cloud that is slowly dissolving into pixels. Behind her, across a sea of data, a Spanish caravel and a modern cargo ship trace five centuries of transnational global enterprise. Flanking her are two crowned columns wrapped in banners, the Pillars of Hercules and their motto PLUS ULTRA, "further beyond," the emblem of the Spanish empire, stamped on its silver coins and one of the proposed origins of the dollar sign.

The inscription above her head reads ARS ANTIDOTUM EST. Art is the antidote. It is the phrase at the heart of this exhibition. In the pediment above, a camera eye looks back at us, encircled by an ouroboros biting its own tail against a dark field of binary, the cycle of life and death that governs any system, organic or computational.

The wings hold two alchemical vessels. The first is crowned and holds three birds, black, white, and red, the three great stages of the work: the nigredo, the albedo, and the rubedo. In the second, the glass has broken and a phoenix of fire flies free, liberation and the final stage of the Magnum Opus. This is the end of the work, the thing that survives its own burning. Below them, tablets burn in a fire marked with the signs of mercury, salt, and sulfur, the three principles of Paracelsus. On the other side, a book rests inside a laurel wreath, bearing the sign of the philosopher's stone.

Closed, the doors show a Virgin in the colonial manner, robed and crowned, standing between parted red curtains like a figure on a stage, with a banner across her feet reading MISS INFORMATION. Read one way it is a title, a pageant sash, a beauty queen. Read the other way it is precisely what she is dispensing. Code rains down behind her, and the letters and numbers woven into her mantle are the fictional code on which our whole civilization is built. With her open hands she presents a heart rising from a chalice, our human essence emerging from the inventions that encapsulate it.