CHARLOTTA RUTH
Programme for applied Questioning was a participatory environment conceived by Cordula Daus & Charlotta Ruth in close collaboration with programmer Simon Repp and a transdisciplinary team. The site-specific work was created for the big garden and former atelier of artist Fritz Wotruba, nowadays Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts Vienna and co-produced by brut wien. 150 Audience visitors, on average staying 2-3 hours, entered the Questionology Programme on 5 occasions in June 2021.
To ask questions and questioning might be one of the few genuinely “human” capacities remaining.
At the core of the QUESTIONOLOGY programme was the idea to exercise this ability extensively; to train it like a muscle.
The environment was structured like a cirquit training or multiple choice questionnaire of five quests, where poetic, collective and absurd tools to improve own questioning were given. With the help of phygital interfaces, "which-craft", towels, bricks, electronic waste and a lump of play doh each quest trained and generated a specific - sometimes automated - form of questioning.
A semi-automated system was generated for systematising the thoughts/objects/data/ that was generated or collected by the visitors. An “everything is already here machine” that was fed by the thoughts and group intelligence of the participants. Towards the end, the participants gained insights about the back-end and where given an individual report and dream prescription. Dramaturgically it however remained ambiguous wether the QUESTIONOLOGY programme also collected data for other than individual purposes.
Concept, environment: Cordula Daus and Charlotta Ruth
Programming, sound: Simon Repp
Almost Doctors: Waltraud Brauner, Cordula Daus, [M] Dudeck, Gilbert Grünbühel,
Imani Rameses, Charlotta Ruth, Simon Repp
Architecture: Hinnerk Utermann
Object design: Susanne Song-Yi Griem, Sofia Romberg
Logo: Vasilis Marmatakis
Graphic design: Maiko Sakurai Karner
Collaboration sound installation: Thomas Grill, Till Bovermann, Almut Schilling
(Rotting sounds, FWF AR445)
Installation office: Margarete Jahrmann
Production: Dominik Grünbühel
Technical support: Felipe Duque
A co-production by Flat-Corner Kunstverein, Zentrum Fokus Forschung,
University of Applied Arts Vienna, brut Wien, MDT Stockholm, with the
kind support of Kulturabteilung der Stadt Wien and Federal Ministery Republic of Austria Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. Thanks to Sebastian Bark, Cornelia Bast, Philipp Ehmann and Steffi Hofer.
