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"33 Questions Per Minute" (Relational Architecture 5) consists of a computer program which uses grammatical rules to combine words from a dictionary and generate 4.7 trillion unique, fortuitous questions. The automated questions are presented at a rate of 33 per minute—the threshold of legibility. The system will take over 271,000 years to ask all possible questions.

This piece is loosely based on the long tradition of automatic poetry; it is full of anti-content. It attempts to underline our incapability to respond, faced with an electronic landscape made up of demands for attention. The piece provides useless and slightly frustrating machine irony; tireless grammatical algorithms perform a romantic and futile attempt to pose questions that have never been asked.

The effect of the installation is destabilizing due to its speed. The rhythm of questions excludes any rational answer. 33 questions a minute is the threshold of legibility: there is no time for reflection. The majority of the automatic questions are absurd: “Will you bleed in an orderly fashion?”; “Is the creator always being born?”; “Do I snip the marriage bed without rhyme or reason?” Sometimes, this surreal wordplay turns up poignant questions that do have meaning within the context in which they are exhibited: “Who bribes the artist?”; “Why did computers become so self-congratulatory?”

The piece exists in Spanish (made for the Havana Biennial), English (made for the Istanbul Biennial), German (made for the Postdamerplatz Realities United Spots media façade), and French (made for the first exhibition of the piece in Montreal at the Musée d’art contemporain).