Location 2

ANSWERS (NATO BASES) is a series of question and answer sessions videotaped during normal working hours with military personnel stationed at two NATO Headquarters locations in Europe.  Using terminology from the institution's mission statement as a starting point, ANSWERS prompts philosophical introspection and dialogue surrounding language in the workplace.  It functions both as a performative and self-spectatorial platform which unfolds a complex set of issues surrounding productivity, words and goal oriented meaning.  It offers participants the chance to reconceptualize language in instances where its meaning has been lost, simplified or sublimated due to its application in the practical field.


Location 2

While mission statements are meant to offer a formal justification for the existence of an institution, by design, the language of mission statements rarely addresses this justification directly.  Instead, the language chosen is often intentionally vague in order to soften the potential disconnect between an institutions stated goals and its actual relationship to the larger social, economic, and political world.  The use of words in highly structuralized settings tends to streamline or simplify their meaning, and our abstract and theoretical interaction with them is forgotten in favor of utility.  In ANSWERS these words, whether lost to the intangibility of the mission or washed out through overuse, are presented as being approachable, and the questions asked are direct:  What is information?  What is knowledge? Can information be simulated?  Is knowledge possible? 

In addressing these questions, each participant is temporarily placed in an egalitarian seat of authority that cannot exist in the highly stratified world of the military.  Whether a private or a colonel, the respondent has the option to affirm, question, or redefine the language that pervades their daily work within the institution.  As one participant explained, ANSWERS prompts a "switch from realistic life to theoretical life," and it is the goal of this project in part to lessen the gap between the two, or at least temporarily place them on equal footing within the walls of the institution itself.


Location 1

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ANSWERS (Harold Washington College)
Location 3