Questioning Art: New Installation About Inquiry

By David Pescovitz (from Boing Boing) on May 25, 2011

Are you experienced? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Can we talk? Who is in charge here? These are just some of the myriad questions that may be posed to you as you walk through the quiet, minimalist gallery inside San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum.

The room is mostly bare, save for a series of speakers lining the perimeter of the room. As you pass each speaker, a different conundrum can be heard. Walk around room dozens of times, and you'll hear different questions every time, pulled from historical Jewish texts, literature, pop culture, and online submissions. This is a new installation titled "Are We There Yet?: 5,000 Years of Answering Questions", created by Bay Area designer Gil Gershoni and UC Berkeley robotics/media professor Ken Goldberg, an internationally-known technology artist.

"(A central text of Judaism,) the Talmud is a surprisingly contemporary model for communal conversation in the digital age," the artists explain. "Rather than resolving each issue with an authoritative unified 'answer,' each page of the Talmud reflects the spiraling layers of debate and celebrates the dissent at the heart of Jewish thought and tradition. Open inquiry is fundamental to electronic connectivity and social media: the culture of new media encourages participation and a natural skepticism about the authenticity and authority of information."

The project pulls a thread dating back thousands of years through Jewish culture and weaves it with innovative digital technology to create a unique, playful, poetic, and perhaps even spiritual experience as you wander the room.

The art installation combines computer vision, machine learning, and an advanced audio system to create the psychologically-immersive experience. (A video about the tech is here.) Are We There Yet? also blends the physical and the virtual. The artwork bleeds into the Web, Twitter, Facebook, and free iOS app that offers anyone the opportunity to read and propose questions for the exhibit.

"The installation is the focal point where your body activates the space to evoke questions in a way that's never been done before," say Goldberg and Gershoni.

There's an old Jewish joke in which a man asks a rabbi, ""Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?" The rabbi answers: "Do we?"

What are your pressing questions?

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As co-editor of Boing Boing, David Pescovitz is a collector of online anomalies, esoterica, and curiosities. He is also a research director at Institute for the Future.

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