User:Flo/QuestioningQuestions

Questioning Questions

A quick log on the tutorial given on 31st of January 2022

Questions

When Camilo, Kendal and I sat down to think of a tutorial we could do with the group we quickly came to the conclusion we all are interested in questions; how to ask questions in our project, how to formulate a question, how to have a dialogue with asking questions or deconstruct the question by seeing a question as a sentence and not as a need to give an answer.

Tutorial

Camilo and me gathered all our questions we use or have used in our research (Kendal could not attend). We deconstructed the questions into words and printed the sentences and the words and cut them into pieces. We scrambled the words of both our projects and scrambled the questions together into a words and a questions pile. Two of the participants joined remote, so we prepared a part on this pad with a list of the questions and an online pile of words. We started with our idea behind the question, how it relates to our own research. We wanted to give context to this tutorial by talking about "the bag" from Ursula K Le Guin. In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1989) she speculates on this "bag" as a starting point of humanity, to tell a story from a gatherer point of view instead of the hunter/ hero. The mix of all the questions on our research and the mixing of the words (keywords) simulates this theory; we wanted to research, deconstruct, reconstruct "our" bag of questions and merge them with all the bags of the participants. For this to happen we asked everyone to take the scraps of paper with questions and/ or words and scramble them, reformulate them or write down new questions. We asked: "¿How could you formulate these questions in a different way? Change words? Change order? Mix up different questions? Adding words from your own "bag"? Combine questions? ¿What questions come up reading these questions? Answer the question with another question?". We collected all newly formed questions in a bowl and on the pad and collectively read them out load.

Output

New sentences

These sentences were formed during the tutorial (written down in no chronological order):

Is competition a form of collaboration? Is local better than global? How does reader behave in the paperless context? How can we reclaim public space? What is the difference between networked publishing and promiscuous publishing? How are they different in movement? Does publishing outside instagram is a political act? If you publish on a platform (like e-books, podcast on spotify) are these platforms the publisher too? What is glocal? Why is being effective important? How many seeds do you need to sow to grow a strong infrastructure, which branches will outgrow the limits of urgency? Is "research" driven by paranoia? Can queer databases circulate without becoming another commodity product? What does ambiqguity mean? How do you spell this? If the center/periphery model is put in place to support the city as a place of (capitalist)industrial production, then how can we understand the term "periphery" in relation to a publication? Why is that important to me? What are the dangers of a ludified smart city?

Notes on the tutorial

After reading together all newly formed questions out loud we asked everyone from the group to share their thoughts on the tutorial.

Taken from the pad, noted by Manetta:

Interesting and easy going way that can touch upon many things that we're busy with now, both life and research, formulated not only by me but formulated by all of us.

Even though these are cut ups, there is a sense of connection in terms of discourse, it feels like the questions are formulated by one single voice. Talking in a framework that has already been started. Bouncing further. To not start from scratch.

Lot of inspiring questions made by others, some were very relatable to my own project. It helped to broaden my horizon in a time that i am thinking a lot about my own project only. I'm thinking a lot about web design these days, i'm trying to be and think more realistic these day and some questions here on the table were more philosophical which helps me to open up my own thinking. "i could think that way"

workshop as a method? Where can this method be used for? When? How and by whom?

Searching other points of view. Diffractive questioning?

Different points of view? Different ways of formulating questions? Different perspectives? Multiplicity?

This can also be a method to zoom out. Good to do this right now, at this point in the year. It feel very pleasant to not have an unexpected outcome. If you asked me to keep doing this it would be fine to me, it's very nice to do. Taking a step back also helps to be concious about which words you use to think with in a research.

Like in Clara's workshop, it really helps to have a strict framework. It also helps a lot that not all the questions need to be perfect. By continuing and formulating another and another and another questions, it is very generative.

Now i'm diving deep in diffractive methodologies, this workshop shows that my hypothesis, that the question can be a diffractive apparatus, it will let you map a pattern of possibilities. It's really beautiful to see it in practice.

Didn't you want us to track what question this question is triggered by? Is it important for you to understand which question triggered which question? On the pad this happened actually, which is interesting. There are different ways to do this. It's interesting in terms of knowing where things are coming from. But in this exercise it's also the beauty that you can get a clue where something is coming from, without directly making the relation. Because i wrote a part of the questions, i do see relations actually. But it could be nice to try to make these traces. There is something intere

"bag" as a metaphor also in relation to "bag-of-words" where the bag is a list of counted words Different understandings and imagination of a "bag", in our minds "Puka": a chaotic mix of different things, that we can use to make something out of it "addressing this topic" is a very different way of approaching a topic or working on a project "the bag you are thinking from", from where you can create associations, set priorities, etc. Also in terms of language, different languages use different rules/grammar to create a question. Spanish uses a question mark placed upside down to introduce to the reader that a line is a question. In Korean, there is no reverse verb/subject to formulate a question, you need to derive information from the context to know if a sentence is a question. Is the ? symbol the same in Korean? Yes it is. But the subject is often not used in the sentence. Is it? Yes. In Korean you can just say "Eat?" and Nami would understand that i want to ask if she wants to eat or not. In Korean, when someone calls me with my name + surname, it feels very official. People don't call me Nami, but they call me Namija. Otherwise it sounds cold and weird. And in Italian, do you use the question mark in the beginning? No. In France we only use the question mark in the end. Ref to a writer that refused to use question marks..... when you say something twice in one sentence, he felt like it was already so obvious that it is a question.

Online you're more on your own. You're more focused on the questions that you would formulate yourself. Enjoying the idea to randomly make a question, you can always find a meaning in apparent randomness. Sometimes you really don't know what to ask to yourself. We're sometimes missing to formulating questions, maybe we are not doubting enough? It helps to open up the mind and let you bump into something that you did not think about.

The fact that you could see everything on the pad took away some part of the fun. On the table the questions were more messily spread around. I expected that multiple people would formulate the same question, but this did not happen.

Next step(s)?

Write the questions down and share it with all of you.

Method for zooming out? Method for zooming in?

I would like to make an interface to navigate through the questions, making relations to the glossary where the question could speak back to. It could become a sort of annotation interface. You are not able to go to the glossary without formulating a question. They become a hypothetical conversation between words. At some point i would like the visitor/reader/user to be able to formulate their own question. It would become a way of reading. Describing something also brings the question of classification, which draws borders. To understand how i can map the glossary, i feel like i need to try it.

Enjoyed the possibility of absurdity. Nice to have space to not make sense. It creates a really interesting dynamic.

Pictures

Links

Pad

Miriam Rasch text in the frame of "Making public" research project by Institute of network cultures

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K Le Guin