Artifact 000 · Edition 1 / 1
The Origin.
Where does a question begin?
One shirt. Made once, never reprinted. The piece that started the house.
Artifact 000 · Artifact Tee
The Origin
Where does a question begin?
$399 + $4.99 shipping
$399, for 399 BCE: the year Athens tried and executed Socrates.
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Why there is only one
The admission before the questions.
Before the six questions there was one admission. Asked why the oracle called him the wisest of men, Socrates answered that he alone knew that he did not know. The Greeks had a word for the state that answer leaves you in: aporia, the honest puzzlement of a road that runs out.
APORIA takes its name from that moment. Artifact 000 is the shirt that started the house: the thinker set inside its mark, made once and never again. Its single owner wears the place where every question in the collection begins.
- history Plato, Apology 21d (c. 399 BCE): Socrates on knowing that he does not know.
- history Plato, Meno 80a: Meno compares Socrates to the torpedo fish that numbs whoever touches it, the classic scene of aporia.
- interpretation "I know that I know nothing" is a later paraphrase; Plato’s Socrates says, more carefully, that he does not think he knows what he does not know.
Exhibit 000 · For its owner
Socrates inside the APORIA mark drawn at monumental scale: the circle, the point, the two horizons.
The shirt carries a museum placard with a permanent QR code. That code is the only way in: the exhibit opens for its owner, and for whoever they choose to show it to.