Questions as tools

The film examines how questions shape creativity, experimentation, and research. It emerges from a broader inquiry into the history and meaning of research and is itself a research project in its own terms. Like anthropologists, the film’s directors, Hideo Mabuchi from Stanford University and Peter N. Miller of the American Academy in Rome, sought to explore a series of complex questions through an interviewing model. They identified a population group likely to be (a) interesting and (b) broad—recipients of MacArthur Foundation Fellowships.

Questions as Tools features interviews with twelve MacArthur Fellows across the arts, sciences, and humanities, eight of whom were Fellows and Residents at the American Academy, and four of whom have Stanford affiliations.

The film challenges the traditional focus on answers as the ultimate goal of inquiry, instead highlighting the power of questions as the primary tool for creativity and intellectual progress. Questions, even without clear answers, can drive entire fields forward. Moreover, while the best answers only accelerate the pace of change, and ultimately their own obsolescence, the best questions remain perennially generative. If anything, the coming era of AI seems likely to raise the importance of questions still further, even giving birth to a new way of talking about the role of questions: “prompt engineering.”

Humanists may have developed the modern structure of research in the middle of the nineteenth century, but it was immediately taken over by scientists. The history of research, in fact, brings these two cultures together in ways that offer fruitful paths forward into the future. Both scientists and humanists use questions as a form of experimentation, and a history of knowledge centered on questions would appear more dynamic, experimental, and even aesthetically pleasing. Since the transformations set in motion by the Bologna Process in 1992, artists have also, increasingly, talked about their work in terms of research, while the prevalence of “archive”-based, or -related, work continues to grow.

In scholarly work, whether by scientists or humanists, carefully crafted questions are key to generating meaningful answers, while artists often give birth to answers, and only afterward begin to shape these back into questions. This interview-and-film project explores how these approaches are similar and different. The twelve voices weave together, like a brilliant polyphony, different personal and professional visions, all of which present a rich tapestry of thinking about creativity.

This film is made possible by the MacArthur X-Grant Program with support from the American Academy in Rome and the Stanford Arts Institute.

Hideo Mabuchi

A physicist by training, Hideo Mabuchi explores a nexus of conventional scientific research, craft (as a dedicated ceramist and occasional textile maker), interdisciplinary humanities (from a home base of aesthetic philosophy, new materialism, and literary theory), and integrative education. He teaches and directs Quantum Meta-Engineering, a research laboratory at Stanford University, where he is professor of applied physics. His group’s sponsored research focuses on quantum optics and physics of computation; his personal research further extends to the science of traditional craft materials and processes.

Mabuchi serves on Stanford’s Public Art Committee, Undergraduate Advisory Committee, and Committee in Charge of the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. He is also the Denning Family Director of the Stanford Arts Institute and chair of Stanford’s Breadth Governance Board. Born and raised in Massachusetts, Mabuchi earned an AB in physics from Princeton University in 1992 and a PhD in the same subject from the California Institute of Technology in 1998. He served on the Caltech faculty for nine years before moving to Stanford in 2007. In 2000 he received a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which brought him into community with invaluable new mentors and role models.

Peter N. Miller

Peter N. Miller is President of the American Academy in Rome. Previously he was professor of cultural history and then dean at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, between 2001 and 2023. Miller’s work explores the hows and whys of research, whether among historians, curators, conservators, or artists. He is the author of a series of books on the early seventeenth-century antiquarian Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, on the history of antiquarianism, and on the modern study of objects as evidence. At Bard he cocurated the exhibitions Dutch New York between East and West: The World of Margrieta van Varick (2009–10), Richard Tuttle: What Is the Object? (2022) and Conserving Active Matter (2022), all of which were accompanied by publications. His most recent book is The Weather on 9/9/01: Newspaper Weather Maps and History (2024), published by MER Books).

Miller previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge, Chicago, and Maryland. He was a research fellow at the Warburg Institute and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, as well as a visiting professor at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Marseille and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.