untitled (the tree of knowledge)
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Figure X. Arbor Scientiae (Tree of Science), woodcut from the 1505 Barcelona edition of Ramon Llull's Arbor Scientiae(original work composed c. 1295
«the tree of knowledge & the bibliotheca alexandrina» 2026
The apples are rotting on the floor.
Nobody touched them.
Or everyone did and this is what touching looks like now.
sssssssssssss
Something is always about to bite.
Or already has.
The server rack hums the way the garden must have hummed before the hum became audible, before there was an ear trained enough to hear the difference between silence and the noise underneath silence.
And then they realized they were naked.
Not metaphorically. The exposure was material, was skin, was the sudden unbearable legibility of the body to itself. Knowledge as vulnerability. Knowing as the permanent end of not-knowing, which cannot be undone, which is the only truly irreversible transaction in the record.
We carry the tree in the pocket now.
We bite every morning before we are fully awake.
The apple is the feed, is the search, is the question typed at 3am into a system that has no stake in the answer.
ssssss
The cables run from the rack to the wall to the room to the building to the infrastructure beneath the city to the undersea cables to the data centers burning in the desert to the rare earth minerals pulled from the ground by hands we will never see.
The root system goes deep.
It always did.
We just stopped calling it that.
The K flickers.
Know.
Now.
The apples continue their work on the floor.
Patient, deliberate, accurate.
The apples are rotting on the floor.
Nobody touched them.
Or everyone did and this is what touching looks like now.
sssssssssssss
Something is always about to bite.
Or already has.
The server rack hums the way the garden must have hummed before the hum became audible, before there was an ear trained enough to hear the difference between silence and the noise underneath silence.
And then they realized they were naked.
Not metaphorically. The exposure was material, was skin, was the sudden unbearable legibility of the body to itself. Knowledge as vulnerability. Knowing as the permanent end of not-knowing, which cannot be undone, which is the only truly irreversible transaction in the record.
We carry the tree in the pocket now.
We bite every morning before we are fully awake.
The apple is the feed, is the search, is the question typed at 3am into a system that has no stake in the answer.
ssssss
The cables run from the rack to the wall to the room to the building to the infrastructure beneath the city to the undersea cables to the data centers burning in the desert to the rare earth minerals pulled from the ground by hands we will never see.
The root system goes deep.
It always did.
We just stopped calling it that.
The K flickers.
Know.
Now.
The apples continue their work on the floor.
Patient, deliberate, accurate.
Aramis Navarro, «untitled (the tree of knowledge)», Ausstellungsansicht, 2025.
Photo: Hiltibold, M. Rinderknecht.
