As Barack Hussein Obama reaches the end of his term as POTUS, plans for his presidential library are beginning to emerge. With most presidential materials from the current being born digital, the Obama Presidential Library could be radically different from its predecessors…

…it’s likely that Obama won’t have the voluminous amounts of papers, letters, and other correspondence that all the presidents who came before him did… Obama’s archives will likely be smaller and mostly digital.

Intriguingly, one proposal suggests a city-wide piece of infrastructure rather than a building, reflecting the networked culture which the Obama-era has inhabited.

US Presidential libraries tend to canonise and lionise the subject, rather than inviting critique. It would be interesting to see how a concept such as Pararchive could incorporate a deeply political archive such as this, enabling a notional space for counter-commentary.

Imagine Pararchive stories on the pursuit of Snowden, Manning and Assange (a networked subculture attacking a hierarchical culture!) which utilised materials from the Obama library; revelations around CIA Torture and the Benghazi incident could be explored anew and by a much wider audience.

A future presidential library could be spimey “wikitecture“, providing a living, ongoing reflection on a political legacy.

Read more at io9’s The Obama Library May Be a City-Wide Piece of Public Infrastructure…