The Tree of Knowledge is a monumental 14-metre-high permanent banner installation (spanning five floors of the main staircase in the Au Shue Hung Memorial Library at Hong Kong Baptist University), designed and produced in 2025 by Studio Pollen (Michael Whittle and Atticus Sims), commissioned by HKBU Library.

 

Reimagining the classic ‘tree of knowledge’ as a vast, foam-like constellation of over 200,000 bubbles in shades of blue and green, each bubble represents a discipline, subdiscipline, or field of study. Organised according to standard library classification systems (Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress principles), the bubbles cluster and overlap to form an interconnected, non-hierarchical landscape, drawing on Peter Sloterdijk’s metaphor of knowledge as ‘foam,’ where spheres of understanding coexist, touch, and co-fragile in a dynamic, polyspheric network rather than a rigid trunk-and-branches structure.

 

Inspired by historical models—Porphyry’s Tree, Ramon Llull’s Arbre de ciència, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, and the Dewey system—the composition captures the explosive growth of modern knowledge production and the rise of interdisciplinary fields. Accompanied by an interactive website (library.hkbu.edu.hk/TreeOfKnowledge) for digital exploration, the banner transforms the library staircase into a living visual essay on the organisation, diversification, and interconnectedness of human understanding in an AI-accelerated era.

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