The many questions of Ai Weiwei
AI VS A.I.
“If humans will ever be liberated, it will be because we ask the right questions, not provide the right answers.”
81 Days. 81 Questions.
From now until March, for 81 days at 20:24 GMT in London (Picadilly), Seoul, Milan, Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and Berlin, Ai is asking A.I. a daily question.
Can you keep secrets? Ai Weiwei to A.I. courtesy of CIRCA
“This is about freedom of questions. Everybody has the right to ask questions.”
Why 81 questions you may ask? This is the amount of days Ai Weiwei spent in custody being interrogated by Chinese officials. A time in his life when he could not ask questions and the fundamental questions “Why was I jailed? Why was I released?” remain unanswered to this day.
“Authorities always know more than you, and they play a game of not telling you what they know”
Can you become a whistleblower? Ai Weiwei to A.I. courtesy of CIRCA
Many of the questions being asked in Ai Weiwei’s project are jumping off points, for example, ‘What are the most essential values of human life?' There is no definitive answer to this. No scientist or Artificial Intelligence can fully envelope what it is to be a person (yet). The answers given by AI will always be a reduction of the human experience but that’s not the point. One of the most charged aspects of this project is a reinvigoration of philosophy in daily life.
Who needs justice the most? Ai Weiwei to A.I. Courtesy of CIRCA
“Many of the questions are not answerable but the questions are valid.”
The inspiration for this project came from the heavenly questions (Tiānwèn) attributed to the poet Qu Yuan. As Ai Weiwei points out on Circa’s website: “Answers are routinely and blandly mass-produced in knowledge factories – including schools, religious institutions, nations and national myths – yet we often believe answers remain more important than questions. Questions are, in themselves, generative: in asking, we sketch out a terrain vague of human inquiry: for thousands of years, Chinese poets and thinkers asked what we might find walking on the surface of the moon, says Ai – this unknown fueling creativity and generating poetry and song. For this fertile landscape of imagination, the arrival of astronauts on the moon and the photography of dusty craters delivered by lunar exploration marked the destruction of creative terrain. “Expression has always been structured by words and by forms – as fairy tales and mythology,” says Ai. “We have to give a symbolic character to any expression.”
Is art worth collecting? Question by Ai Weiwei to AI.
This project is powered by CIRCA
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