The God Project, The First Intergalactic Art Exposition, The Photosynthetic Restaurant
Jonathon Keats (born October 2, 1971) is an American conceptual artist and experimental philosopher[1] known for creating large-scale thought experiments. Keats was born in New York City and studied philosophy at Amherst College.[2] He now lives in San Francisco and Italy.[3]
Art projects
Early work
Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for 24 hours, with a female model posing nude in the gallery. His thoughts were sold to patrons as art, at a price determined by dividing their annual income down to the minute.[4][5]
In 2002 Keats held a petition drive to pass the Law of Identity, A ≡ A, a law of logic, as statutory law in Berkeley, California. Specifically, the proposed law stated that, "every entity shall be identical to itself." Any entity caught being unidentical to itself was to be subject to a fine of up to one tenth of a cent. Deemed "too weird for Berkeley" in an Oakland Tribune headline, the law did not pass.[6] However it did become a topic of debate in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, garnering cryptic words of support from the Mitt Romney campaign[7] and sparked a copycat petition drive in Santa Cruz, California.[8] In the same year, amidst tightening post-9/11 security, Keats initiated a series of anonymous self-portraits of visitors to the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, created by fingerprinting them as they entered the building.[9][10] And at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, he premiered his first musical composition, "1001 Concertos for Tuning Forks and Audience".[11]
Keats copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that it was a sculpture that he had created, neural network by neural network, through the act of thinking. The reason, he told the BBC World Service when interviewed about the project, was to attain temporary immortality, on the grounds that the Copyright Act would give him intellectual property rights on his mind for a period of seventy years after his death.[12] He reasoned that, if he licensed out those rights, he would fulfill the Cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"), paradoxically surviving himself by seven decades. In order to fund the posthumous marketing of intellectual property rights to his mind, he sold futures contracts on his brain in an IPO at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.[13] The project attracted interest in Silicon Valley.[14] It was later included in News of the Weird[15] and Ripley's Believe It or Not.[16] In 2012, the project was exhibited in London at the Wellcome Collection.[17][18]
Projects 2004–2010
Keats is most famous for attempting to genetically engineer God in a laboratory.[19] He did so in order to determine scientifically where to place God as a species on the phylogenetic tree.[20] In interviews with journalists, he indicated that his initial results showed a close taxonomic relationship to cyanobacteria, but cautioned that his pilot study, which relied on continuous in vitro evolution, was not definitive, urging interested parties to pursue their own research, and to submit findings to the International Association for Divine Taxonomy, on which he served as executive director.[21][22]
In 2005 he started customizing the metric system for patrons including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Pop artistEd Ruscha. He did so by recalibrating time to each person's heartbeat, and mathematically deriving a new length for the meter, liter, kilogram, and calorie accordingly.[23][24]
In 2006 Keats undertook several new projects, including two collaborations with other species: In rural Georgia, he gave fifty Leyland cypress trees the opportunity to make art by providing them with easels.[31][32][33] In Chico, California, he choreographed a ballet for honeybees by selectively planting flowers on the Chico State University farm, reverse engineering honeybee communication to suggest dance arrangements inside hives.[34] Keats also turned to himself as the subject of a lifelong thought experiment, undertaken through the act of living. To make the experiment scientifically rigorous, he established a scientific control in the form of a high-density carbon graphite block precisely calibrated to match the carbon weight of his own body. The block was placed on display under a bell jar at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.[35] And at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, he applied string theory to real estate development, enlisting the legal framework of air rights to buy and sell properties in the extra dimensions of space theorized by physics. To encourage speculation, the artist created blueprints for a four-dimensional tesseract house that purchasers might use as a vacation home.[36][37] One hundred and seventy-two lots on six Bay Area properties were bought on the first day of sales.[38]
In 2007, Keats created a mobile ring tone based on the John Cage composition 4'33", a remix comprising precisely four minutes and 33 seconds of digital silence,[39] sparking controversy in the classical music community,[40][41] and the world of technology,[42] while attracting a following in the world of astrology.[43] Titled "My Cage (Silence for Cellphone)", the ringtone has since been broadcast on public radio in both the United States[44] and Sweden,[45] discussed in a monograph about Cage published by Yale University Press,[46] and included in a museum exhibition on Cage at HMKV in Dortmund, Germany.[47] In Chico, California, Keats opened the world's first porn theater for house plants, projecting video footage of pollination onto the foliage of ninety rhododendrons.[48][49][50] He released a cinematic trailer on YouTube.[51] His film was widely commented upon in the media[52][53] following coverage by Reuters[54] and the BBC News Hour.[55] At the RT Hansen Gallery[56] in Berlin, Germany, he sold arts patrons the experience of spending money.[57] For an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum,[58] he designed a new kind of electronic voting booth, based on a nationwide network of ouija boards.[59][60] While ouija voting booths have yet to be implemented in a major election, California Magazine cited the project in a 2007 round-up of "25 Brilliant California Ideas".[61] At Modernism Gallery in San Francisco the following month, Keats developed new miracles, including novel solar systems and supernovapyrotechnic displays, which he made available for licensing by gods.[62][63][64] In addition, he composed a sonata to be performed on the constellations,[65] released through GarageBand.[66]
In early 2009, Keats was an artist-in-residence at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he opened the world's second porn theater for house plants, based on the porn theater he opened in Chico, CA in 2007, but in this case catering to an audience of local zinnias.[114] He also composed a song to be performed by Mandeville Creek on the MSU campus, orchestrated by rearranging rocks melodically, using the musical structure of the medievalrondeau.[115] In June, Keats created "The Longest Story Ever Told," a 9 word story printed on the cover of the eighth issue of Opium Magazine, "The Infinity Issue."[116][117][118] The story is printed in a double layer of black ink, with the second layer screened to make each successive word fractionally less vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. When exposed to sunlight, words will appear at a rate of one per century over the next one thousand years,[119][120][121] an effort deemed one of the seven best magazine tech innovations by Tech Radar[122] and called Joycean by NBC,[123] but judged to be "about as practical as a shark in formaldehyde" by the Independent (UK).[124] Keats attempted to counteract the global recession in November by introducing a mirror economy backed by antimatter.[125][126][127] In order to implement his idea, Keats opened an "anti-bank" which issued paper currency in units of 10,000 positrons and higher.[128][129] Featured on Good Magazine's annual Good 100 list,[130] Keats's First Bank of Antimatter was championed by New Scientist as "a true attempt to make something out of nothing"[131] and lambasted by The Discovery Channel as "the epitome of caveat emptor".[132]
Keats introduced four new projects in 2010. In January he created a pinhole camera intended to take a single 100-year-long exposure.[133][134] Printed in Good Magazine, the simple box camera was designed to be cut out, folded, and glued together, and then left to take a picture which the magazine promised to publish in a "special folio" as part of the January 2110 issue.[135] In February, Keats expanded his filmmaking for plants into a new genre.[136][137] Observing that plants aren't mobile, he produced a travel documentary – showing footage of Italian skies – which he screened for an audience of ficus and palm trees at the AC Institute in New York City through early March,[138][139] and later in the year presented to an audience of mixed species, with musical accompaniment by the composer Theresa Wong, at the Berkeley Art Museum in California.[140] He also produced an online version of the movie for viewing by plants at home, posted by Wired News[141] Following an AFP wire story,[142] news of the travel documentaries was reported worldwide, though not in Italy.[143][144][145][146][147] Keats launched an alternative space agency, the Local Air and Space Administration (LASA), in October.[148] Headquartered at California State University, Chico,[149] the organization claimed to be taking on the exploratory role abandoned by NASA, and announced simultaneous missions to the Moon and Mars.[150] Rather than building rockets, LASA amassed lunar and martian terrain locally in California, by pulverizing meteorites.[151] The first LASA astronauts were potatoes grown in water mineralized with lunar anorthosite and martian shergottite, exploring the Moon and Mars by osmosis, according to Keats, who further argued that the minerals they absorbed over their month-long missions made them "alienhybrids".[152][153] LASA also entered the space tourism business,[154] offering humans the opportunity to explore the Moon and Mars by buying and drinking bottled lunar and martian mineral waters at an "exotourism bureau" in San Francisco.[155][156][157] At the same time that he was managing the Local Air & Space Administration, Keats started independently to produce pornography for God.[158][159] The source for his pornography was the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which had just begun to replicate Big Bang conditions at a small scale. Reasoning that the Big Bang was "divine coitus",[160] Keats screened a live feed from the LHC on a votivealtar.[161] He opened his "porn palace for God" at the alternative art space Louis V. ESP in Brooklyn, New York.[162] While Keats explained that he had become "God's pornographer" in order to encourage God to create additional universes since our own was doomed by cosmic expansion,[163] worldwide opinion on the worthiness of his project was mixed.[164][165][166][167][168][169][170][171]
Keats turned his attention to flora again in early 2011, opening a "photosynthetic restaurant" where plants could enjoy "gourmet sunlight".[172][173][174][175] Recipes were prepared by filtering solar radiation through colored plexiglass.[176][177] The restaurant was installed in the outdoor gardens of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, where 100-year-old rose bushes were the first patrons.[178][179][180][181] Keats catered to plants elsewhere in the world by publishing a recipe book[182][183] and also producing TV dinners for plants, which could experience gourmet sunlight vicariously through the changing colors on a television screen or computer monitor. Plants can access the TV dinners via Wired.[184] In May 2011, Keats presented New Yorkers with an alternative to marriage that dispensed with governmental formalities, promising instead to bind people together by a law of nature.[185][186] He adapted the methodology of quantum entanglement, which is used in physics laboratories to make two or more subatomic particles behave as if they were one and the same.[187][188][189] Using equipment bought on eBay, Keats built an "entanglement engine" that ostensibly could entangle people who visited the AC Institute in New York City.[190][191][192][193][194] Demonstrating the mechanism on NPR's Science Friday, he cautioned that "those who get entangled will have to take their entanglement on faith, as any attempt to measure a quantum system disentangles it: A quantum marriage will literally be broken up by skepticism about it."[195] In October 2011, Keats fomented a "Copernican Revolution in the arts."[196][197][198] In a manifesto published by Zyzzyva, he declared that "while the Copernican Revolution has enlightened scientists for centuries, art remains Ptolemaic," favoring masterpieces rather than average phenomena.[199] To attain Copernican "mediocrity" in the arts, he produced paintings that were the average color of the universe, a light shade of beige, which he exhibited at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, California.[200][201][202] He also showed sculptures that were made of hydrogen gas, the most common elemental matter in the universe,[203] and presented a "Retempered Clavier" that randomized J.S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier to bring it into accord with the increased entropy of the universe.[204][205] Gallery visitors could purchase cans of "universal anti-seasoning," which was formulated to make cuisine more bland.[206]
Keats opened a "Microbial Academy of Sciences" in January 2012.[207][208][209] Situated in the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery, his academy provided colonies of cyanobacteria with access to imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, which he said would allow the photosynthetic microbes to do astrophysical research.[210][211][212][213][214] In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Keats explained that he was motivated by the unresolved scientific quest for a theory of everything, the failings of which he attributed to the complexity of the human brain relative to the simplicity of the universe. He claimed that the fundamental laws of physics could more readily be grasped by cyanobacteria than by humans, because "cyanobacteria are not burdened by all that gray matter.”[215]
In April 2012, Keats launched the Electrochemical Currency Exchange Co. in the basement of Rockefeller Center.[216][217] According to The Economist, his enterprise exploited "electrochemicalarbitrage", generating energy by taking advantage of differences in the metallic content of Chinese and American coinages.[218] The energy generated was used to power a data processing center, but, due to the low wattage, the center consisted of pocket calculators, limiting computations to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.[219][220][221] On May 16, 2012, a similar experiment was held in Hong Kong in the lobby of an HSBC building. But this time the electrochemical charge was derived exclusively from Chinese currency: aluminum Chinese fen and brass Hong Kong pennies.[212][222] A special website was made for this particular event.[223]
^Shiels, Maggie (October 27, 2003). "BBC World Service". BBC News. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
^Ryan Singel (October 10, 2003). "Wired News". Wired. Archived from the original on October 11, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
^Silicon Valley San Jose Business Journal (October 27, 2003). "San Jose Business Journal". Sanjose.bizjournals.com. Retrieved December 2, 2011. {{cite news}}: |author= has generic name (help)
^Alkon, Amy (December 31, 2003). "News of the Weird". Charlotte.creativeloafing.com. Archived from the original on June 16, 2011. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
^Rob Brezsny (December 3, 2008). "Free Will Astrology". Villagevoice.com. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
^"American Public Media". Weekendamerica.publicradio.org. January 26, 2008. Archived from the original on September 28, 2011. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
^Jason Zasky Filed under Book Reviews (August 29, 1952). "Failure Magazine". Failuremag.com. Archived from the original on September 30, 2011. Retrieved December 2, 2011.
