“How can we truly relocate the nature of art to face and to facilitate our need for human communication, human connection?” Chicago-based curator Mary Jane Jacob posed this question during the World Question Center (Reloaded), a performance developed by Jens Hoffmann and BAK, basis voor actuele kunst. On 1 November 2003, we phoned artists, theorists, scientists, and brilliant minds from all disciplines living around the world during a four-hour performance. Since then, the conversations we had have been a vital source of inspiration, encouragement, and stimulus for our work at BAK. The same has been said by members of the audience, who excitedly “lived through” one meaningful encounter after another. There is a reason for the on-going resonance of this experience. In my opinion, the World Question Center (Reloaded) was actually one of those rare occasions for authentic human communication, the kind that Mary Jane Jacob hoped for. Perhaps it also generated a shared understanding of what actually was, is at stake: The belief that the world can be transformed and the responsibility of artists and intellectuals to envision this transformation and imagine what the world could potentially, in a positive sense, become.

The World Question Center (Reloaded) espoused the method of posing questions that artist James Lee Byars (1932—1997) employed throughout his practice. In his search for a perfect thought, in 1969 Byars created World Question Center. Initially, he planned to bring together the hundred “most brilliant minds” of his day and let them ask each other the questions they were asking themselves. It was, however, not possible to gather all these people together in one location, so Byars decided to contact each of them by telephone and ask what questions they considered urgent for themselves, their fields of activity, or for the “evolution of knowledge.” According to Byars, the perfect thought must take form of a question, an inquiry. He believed one does not proceed forward with answers and explanations: “If they [answers] are given, you will once more be facing a terminus. They cannot get you any further than you are at present.” One could say that the list of questions Byars collected through conversations with artists, scientists, philosophers, etc. for his World Question Center formed a critical document of his time. What does such a document look like more than thirty years later? What do the questions posed by the brilliant minds of our time tell us about the world we live in?

Interview with Mary Jane Jacob (p. 68-69)
Jacob: Hello?
JH: Hello, Mary Jane Jacob? It's Jens Hoffman her from World Question Center (Reloaded). How are you? How is the morning in Chicago?
MJJ:Good
JH: We are calling you to ask if you could give us a question that is very important to you right now, for your practice as a curator.
MJJ: Yes. I don't know if you will find this too general but at the same time I find it quite specific. My question is how we can truly relocate the nature of art to help us in this urgent need that people have for a kind of connected communication? I bring this question up because I am really so stunned by the very tangible, uncomplicated, non-technological need that people seem to have for conversation within our field of art. And how that seems to, in such very essential ways, relate to maybe even a primal kind of human need? And this is something, which in part we do, what you're doing right at this very moment by calling me on my cell phone in my car in Chicago an you are there in the Netherlands, right? So we have this possibility.
JH: Exactly.
MJJ: But maybe it is because we have all these possibilities of finding each other--in a car, on the street, on a mountaintop. People are also fighting the impossibility of having a meaningful conversation. Because we see that lack of understanding may be greatly manifested by the political actions of the United States government today in the world. This complete lack of understanding, interconnectivity, not just connectivity but interconnectivity.
JH: Mary Jane, can I just repeat the question because we are writing down all question here on blackboards from all the people that we are calling from all over the world, just to make sure that we got it. What you're saying in one short question is: How can we truly relocate the nature of art to face and to facilitate our need for human communication, human connection?"
MJJ: Yes.
JH: Very good, thank you very much. It was a pleasure as always. I will see you very soon in Helsinki, bye, bye.
MJJ: We'll stay connected, bye.