IDose Makes the Poison (2025) by Anna Bunting-Branch: Extraction, Survival and Recursive Return
Dose Makes the Poison (2025), an experimental web-based visual novel by Anna Bunting-Branch, returns to the myth of silphium, the plant often described as the first known case of human-driven extinction. The work does not treat this as a botanical anecdote; it asks a more urgent question: who has the authority to extract value from a living, breathing autopoietic being?
Silphium, cultivated in Cyrene in North Africa, was prized across the ancient Mediterranean world. It functioned as seasoning, perfume and medicine. Classical sources describe its resin as treating coughs, fevers, digestive disorders and inflammation. Most controversially, it was widely recorded as a contraceptive and abortifacient; a plant associated with reproductive regulation and autonomy. Its heart-shaped seedpod was stamped onto coins, becoming both economic emblem and biological agent.
In dominant Western histories, silphium appears as a cautionary tale of overharvesting; a valuable species extracted to disappearance. Its extinction is framed as mismanagement within a system of resource control. Bunting-Branch unsettles this narrative by allowing the plant to speak. Silphium shifts from commodity to subject; from object of trade to self-organising life form with memory.
Recent research by Professor Mahmut Miski in 2025, suggesting that silphium may have altered its genetic structure in order to survive, introduces another possibility. If the plant changed form rather than vanished, then extinction may describe a failure of recognition rather than a final ending. What disappears from record may persist in altered states.
Within the framework of a Carib Cosmotechnic, this shift becomes structural rather than metaphorical. Absence, disappearance, a dearth of existence, what might be figured as zero ( ), is not an empty void but a generative threshold. Form dissolves and reorganises. Memories of former states echo in DNA, as the caterpillar persists within the butterfly, not erased but reconfigured. Loss is not terminal; it is recursive. Life withdraws, mutates, and re-enters. Seen through this lens, silphium is not a symbol of terminal collapse but of patterned return. She becomes a living system capable of recalibration; a being that withdraws from extractive visibility and reappears in altered configuration. Survival does not mean remaining unchanged; it means adapting within a wider field of relations.
The visual novel’s branching structure and haunting musical score reinforces this cosmology. Narrative does not move in a straight line; it proliferates. Desire determines direction; pathways fork and loop. The reader navigates a living system rather than a closed moral lesson. Extinction is no longer a fixed endpoint; it becomes a shift in state. Silphium’s recorded abortive and contraceptive properties further complicate the narrative of loss. Dose determines outcome; regulation replaces excess. The plant’s medicinal and reproductive functions situate it within a complex ecology of balance, where thriving depends on calibration rather than domination. Poison and cure are not opposites; they are positions within a relational system.
Against extractive humanism, which places the human at the apex of value and renders other life as resource, Dose Makes the Poison imagines an alternative arrangement. Plants, humans, microbes, myths and technologies coexist within a complex algorithmic ecology; not ordered by violent hierarchy but sustained through dynamic interdependence. The work proposes not survival through control, but flourishing through relational balance.
Silphium, in this reading, is not gone. She has shifted register. She persists as botanical possibility, reproductive politics, cultural memory and encoded pattern; an ancient system still unfolding in the present.
Dose Makes The Poison (2025) is an experimental visual novel by artist Anna Bunting-Branch. The story is published by The Mechatronic Library with an accompanying gamebook.
This work is best viewed on a desktop browser.
Story, animation and coding by Anna Bunting-Branch
Sound composed by Rosie Carr
Sound recorded at This Museum Is Not Obsolete
Sound production by Johnny Goddard
Dose Makes the Poison (2025), an experimental web-based visual novel by Anna Bunting-Branch, returns to the myth of silphium, the plant often described as the first known case of human-driven extinction. The work does not treat this as a botanical anecdote; it asks a more urgent question: who has the authority to extract value from a living, breathing autopoietic being?
Silphium, cultivated in Cyrene in North Africa, was prized across the ancient Mediterranean world. It functioned as seasoning, perfume and medicine. Classical sources describe its resin as treating coughs, fevers, digestive disorders and inflammation. Most controversially, it was widely recorded as a contraceptive and abortifacient; a plant associated with reproductive regulation and autonomy. Its heart-shaped seedpod was stamped onto coins, becoming both economic emblem and biological agent.
In dominant Western histories, silphium appears as a cautionary tale of overharvesting; a valuable species extracted to disappearance. Its extinction is framed as mismanagement within a system of resource control. Bunting-Branch unsettles this narrative by allowing the plant to speak. Silphium shifts from commodity to subject; from object of trade to self-organising life form with memory.
Recent research by Professor Mahmut Miski in 2025, suggesting that silphium may have altered its genetic structure in order to survive, introduces another possibility. If the plant changed form rather than vanished, then extinction may describe a failure of recognition rather than a final ending. What disappears from record may persist in altered states.
Within the framework of a Carib Cosmotechnic, this shift becomes structural rather than metaphorical. Absence, disappearance, a dearth of existence, what might be figured as zero ( ), is not an empty void but a generative threshold. Form dissolves and reorganises. Memories of former states echo in DNA, as the caterpillar persists within the butterfly, not erased but reconfigured. Loss is not terminal; it is recursive. Life withdraws, mutates, and re-enters. Seen through this lens, silphium is not a symbol of terminal collapse but of patterned return. She becomes a living system capable of recalibration; a being that withdraws from extractive visibility and reappears in altered configuration. Survival does not mean remaining unchanged; it means adapting within a wider field of relations.
The visual novel’s branching structure and haunting musical score reinforces this cosmology. Narrative does not move in a straight line; it proliferates. Desire determines direction; pathways fork and loop. The reader navigates a living system rather than a closed moral lesson. Extinction is no longer a fixed endpoint; it becomes a shift in state. Silphium’s recorded abortive and contraceptive properties further complicate the narrative of loss. Dose determines outcome; regulation replaces excess. The plant’s medicinal and reproductive functions situate it within a complex ecology of balance, where thriving depends on calibration rather than domination. Poison and cure are not opposites; they are positions within a relational system.
Against extractive humanism, which places the human at the apex of value and renders other life as resource, Dose Makes the Poison imagines an alternative arrangement. Plants, humans, microbes, myths and technologies coexist within a complex algorithmic ecology; not ordered by violent hierarchy but sustained through dynamic interdependence. The work proposes not survival through control, but flourishing through relational balance.
Silphium, in this reading, is not gone. She has shifted register. She persists as botanical possibility, reproductive politics, cultural memory and encoded pattern; an ancient system still unfolding in the present.
Dose Makes The Poison (2025) is an experimental visual novel by artist Anna Bunting-Branch. The story is published by The Mechatronic Library with an accompanying gamebook.
This work is best viewed on a desktop browser.
Story, animation and coding by Anna Bunting-Branch
Sound composed by Rosie Carr
Sound recorded at This Museum Is Not Obsolete
Sound production by Johnny Goddard