Interactions in a meanigful world

Questions are not innocent. There are no neutral questions. This is obviously true for human communication. But it is naive to think that questions to information systems are excluded from this constellation.

Data mining, elicitation and collection of explicit or implicit information, that is pre-given implicit or explicit answers to well-formed questions from a query system.

Questions which are not restricted to information about facts are including aspects of relevance, significance, context dependendness and other criteria of meaningful answers.

A simple scheme to support meaningful questions is given by the Diamond Strategies I introduced long ago.

William Olander in 1987: "Clough has developed yet another hybrid-a painting which is simultaneously genuine and artificial, cultural and natural, full and empty, without resorting, overtly at least, to the ideological apparatuses of late modernism."4 and Clough characterizes as: "transformation, inflection, turbulence; a very particular vibrating cosmic tension; weave of force; harmonics of intentionality; subliminal erotics of creation; spontaneity, evocativity; meaning as desire and fear in smoky arabesque; rippling quench; refracting enigmatic shimmer; the lethal chop of value; subtle ofity of itness; dancing with tradition, accepting, rejecting and relentless execution; the power in the compulsion to create as a measure of the ultimacy of humanness, depth of drama; a pulsing overlay, overlap, palimpsest, wave upon wave to come again & again & again..."

Evocative questioning is beyond elicitation and installation (suggestion) and is opening up in a co-creative interplay new answers to new questions, new horizons of questioning.

How are we questioning an object which is characterized by highly hybrid, full of ambiguity and surprising paradoxes? Obviously it can not be done in the same way as we ask for a vacuum cleaner.