Jonathon Keats

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Jonathon Keats (born October 2, 1971) is an American conceptual artist known for creating large-scale thought experiments. Keats was born in New York City and studied philosophy at Amherst College [1]. He now lives in San Francisco.

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[edit] Conceptual Art Projects

Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for twenty-four 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. [2]

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. The law did not pass. However it did spark a copycat petition drive in Santa Cruz, California. [3] [4]

Keats copyrighted his mind in 2003, claiming that it was a sculpture that he'd 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. He reasoned that, if he licensed out those rights, he'd fulfill the Cogito ("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. [5] [6]

Keats is most famous for attempting to genetically engineer God in a laboratory , a 2004 collaboration with geneticists at UC Berkeley. He did so in order to determine scientifically where to place God as a species on the phylogenetic tree. 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. [7] [8]

In 2005 he started customizing the metric system for patrons including Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Pop artist Ed 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. [9]

Around the same time, he became interested in extraterrestrial abstract art, and began producing canvas paintings based on signals detected by the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope in Puerto Rico. [10] [11] This was the basis of the First Intergalactic Art Exposition, a 2006 solo show at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. [12] As part of this exhibition, he also transmitted his own abstract artwork out into the cosmos. [13] [14] [15]

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. [16] [17] 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. [18] Meanwhile, 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. [19] [20] One hundred and seventy-two lots on six Bay Area properties were bought on the first day of sales. [21]

In 2007, Keats created a mobile ring tone based on the John Cage composition 4'33", a remix comprising precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds of digital silence, [22] sparking controversy in the classical music community [23] [24], and the world of technology [25]. Titled "My Cage (Silence for Cellphone)", the ringtone has since been broadcast on public radio in both the United States [26] and Sweden [27]. 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. [28] [29] [30] He released a cinematic trailer on YouTube.[31] His film was widely commented upon in the media [32] [33] following coverage by Reuters [34] and the BBC News Hour. [35] At the RT Hansen Gallery [36] in Berlin, Germany, he sold arts patrons the experience of spending money. [37] For an exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum,[38] he designed a new kind of electronic voting booth, based on a nationwide network of ouija boards. [39] [40] 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". [41] At Modernism Gallery in San Francisco the following month, Keats developed new miracles, including novel solar systems and supernova pyrotechnic displays, which he made available for licensing by gods. [42] [43] [44] In addition, he composed a sonata to be performed on the constellations, [45] released through GarageBand. [46]

[edit] Related Work

Keats is also the art critic for San Francisco Magazine, and writes about art for publications including Art in America, Art & Auction, ArtNews, and Artweek. He's a book critic as well, and the author of two novels, The Pathology of Lies, published in English by Warner Books, [47] [48] and Lighter Than Vanity, published exclusively in Russian by Eksmo. [49] A collection of fables, titled The Book of the Unknown, is reportedly in the works, to be published by Random House. [50]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Amherst Student
  2. ^ San Francisco Chronicle
  3. ^ Legal Affairs
  4. ^ San Francisco Chronicle
  5. ^ BBC World Service
  6. ^ Wired News
  7. ^ SF Gate
  8. ^ Wired News
  9. ^ Europa Star
  10. ^ New Scientist
  11. ^ Wired News
  12. ^ Magnes Museum
  13. ^ San Francisco Chronicle
  14. ^ Oakland Tribune
  15. ^ East Bay Express
  16. ^ Atlanta Journal-Constitution
  17. ^ Extreme Craft
  18. ^ Chico Orion
  19. ^ New Scientist
  20. ^ KALW Radio
  21. ^ California Real Estate Journal
  22. ^ CNET
  23. ^ PostClassic
  24. ^ Sequenza21
  25. ^ Wired News
  26. ^ American Public Media
  27. ^ Swedish Radio
  28. ^ Chico Beat
  29. ^ Rhizome News
  30. ^ CNET
  31. ^ YouTube Trailer
  32. ^ Washington Post
  33. ^ New York Magazine
  34. ^ Reuters
  35. ^ BBC
  36. ^ RT Hansen Gallery
  37. ^ Wired News
  38. ^ Berkeley Art Museum
  39. ^ Oakland Tribune
  40. ^ Gizmodo
  41. ^ California Magazine
  42. ^ Wired News
  43. ^ CNET
  44. ^ San Francisco Chronicle
  45. ^ San Francisco Bay Guardian
  46. ^ GarageBand Sonata
  47. ^ Salon.com
  48. ^ San Francisco Chronicle
  49. ^ Eksmo
  50. ^ Random House

[edit] External links

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