Conceptual Artist Jonathan Keats and his Socio-Philosophical Thought Experiments

“Acclaimed as a ‘poet of ideas’ by The New Yorker and a ‘multimedia philosopherprophet’ by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer based in the United States and Italy,” states his latest press release. It seems appropriate to use words from one of his press releases to describe him, because Keats’s releases are an integral part of his art.

Since he put up his first exhibit almost 20 years ago, at Refusalon Gallery in San Francisco, Keats has developed a deeply conceptual niche. His projects seem composed of three key things: dry self-awareness, real scientific knowledge, and inspired flights of fancy. These elements coalesce into unique socio-philosophical thought experiments that invite both laughter and sober reflection. For each project, Keats writes a press release that describes its workings, then quotes himself making apparently serious comments about it.

In keeping with this issue’s Home theme, we asked Keats to send examples of past pieces related to home, family, and community. The list included the following.

65Quantum Marriage (2011–15): For this project, Keats transformed a Las Vegas motel room into a wedding chapel offering quantum entanglement to human couples as an alternative to marriage. “Quantum entanglement” refers to a phenomenon that occurs with subatomic particles; far too tiny to see, they can sometimes be observed doing something almost mystical: they can come in pairs whose physical properties seem linked even if the particles are physically distant from each other. To perform the ceremony, there was a kitschy setup with a lab-grown nonlinear crystal and prismatic beam splitter to entangle photons, though there was no way to tell if the ceremony had actually entangled a given couple’s particles on a quantum level. (Schrödinger’s marriage, anyone?)

As part of the press coverage for the piece, Keats told Fast Company: “Quantum entanglement is so incredibly romantic, when you think about it. Two or more particles that become entangled behave as if they’re one and the same, even if they’re a universe apart … what more could you want in a relationship than what those particles share?”

Pangaea Optima (2015): Keats describes this project as “making new global communities by rearranging continents with plate tectonics.” The nonprofit news organization Grist, which focuses on climate change, ran an article saying that the project “involves magnetrons and nuclear reactors and a smushed-together landmass called Pangaea Optima” and that it “represents the kind of last-ditch solution to climate change that would indicate that we had really, really screwed the whole thing up — over and over and over again.”

Other past home-themed projects from Keats include Speculations (2006), “applying string theory to real estate development with multi-dimensional housing.” A current home-themed project is called Intergalactic Omniphonics, for which Keats has built instruments to make music with aliens, and of which he says, “This is about being at home in the universe.” (The press release for Speculations is printed on page 69, right after this interview.)

In relation to our collective home in the Bay Area, it’s worth noting that many Keats projects have been interpreted as tech commentary. Examples include The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative (2017), which the artist describes as “human technologies adapted for the benefit of other species” ; Microbial Associates (2014), “a tech consultancy led by the original disruptors: bacteria”; and Brain Trust (2003), in which Keats says he “copyrighted my brain and sold futures contracts on my neurons in order to attain immortality.”

Keats recently spoke at The Battery about his latest piece, The Bristlecone Calendar. Afterward, he kindly agreed to tell us about his background as a philosopher, how he ended up in the art world, and what motivates him to develop his complex yet playful projects.

Q: A lot of your art appears to be about ideas. I’m curious about the ideas behind those ideas.

A: I’m in the art world only incidentally, because the art world is the only place that will tolerate me.

But although I may not do anything that matters in artistic terms, ideally my work matters in terms of activating thought, as an alternative to academic philosophy. I’m most interested in open-ended inquiry — an active form of curiosity.

What did we do every day as children? We pursued our curiosity through free play. That’s still my preoccupation. And I want others to play along with me — other adults — because children already do it on their own much better than I ever could. So how do I get grownups involved? And how do I impart the importance of curiosity without taking the play out of it? Those are the challenges, and the art world is an accommodating place to take them up.

I believe that all ideas can be accessible to everyone. And I believe we can all engage in the process of thinking about ourselves and our society — and perhaps through universal engagement, some real work can be done.

The importance of this cannot be overstated. Free play is serious business, much more serious than anything currently being done in Washington, D.C. I see this as nothing less than the future of self-determination and democracy and justice and all of these big words that are usually put in all caps and used on monuments in D.C., and then ignored by those who work there.

Q: When you spoke at The Battery, you mentioned that you studied philosophy in college, and that you admire Socrates. Socrates is famous for his practice of questioning, the “Socratic method,” which he never defined precisely. It involves asking question after question in order to reveal the basis for someone’s thoughts.

A: Like almost every modern-day discipline, philosophy is becoming more and more disciplined — more and more specialized. There are very good reasons for that. Yet something essential is lost. We lose the potential for connection. And so I ask myself: how do you do what Socrates did? How do you activate society with big questions?

“In my work, I try to set up a hypothesis in the form of alternate realities. Then I bring people into those worlds, so that together we can observe what transpires.”

The idea of thought experiments appeals to me — not the mode of argumentation used in academic philosophy, where you know what you want people to conclude and you’re leading them there by the nose — but rather as a real experiment. In my work, I try to set up a hypothesis in the form of alternate realities. Then I bring people into those worlds, so that together we can observe what transpires.

Q: How did you go from studying philosophy to being an artist?

A: I went to Amherst College, where I was trained in analytic philosophy, a field mired in technical questions about language, truth, and logic. The training was helpful, especially in terms of rigor, but the only real way to advance was by becoming narrower.

After college, I started writing about art for magazines — San Francisco Magazine at first. Somehow I became the magazine’s art critic, and so I met people in the art world. One of them owned a San Francisco gallery called Refusalon, and he agreed to host my first project, where I thought for 24 hours and sold my thoughts as art. The price varied, and was derived from the annual income of the buyer. Each buyer revealed to the gallery how much money they made per year, that sum was divided to determine earnings per minute, and the buyer paid that much for each minute of thought. We sold several hours of thought. There were approximately

By Lydia Laurenson