jonathon keats

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. ^[1]

In 2002 Keats held a petition drive to pass 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. ^{[2] [3]}

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. ^{[4] [5]}

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. ^{[6] [7]}

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. ^[8]

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. ^{[9] [10]} This was the basis of the First Intergalactic Art Exposition, a 2006 solo show at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. ^[11] As part of this exhibition, he also transmitted his own abstract artwork out into the cosmos. ^{[12] [13] [14]}

In 2006 Keats has undertaken several new projects, including two collaborations with other species: In rural Georgia, he gave fifty leland cypress trees the opportunity to make art by providing them with easels. ^{[15] [16]} In Chico, CA, 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. ^[17] 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. ^{[18] [19]} One hundered and seventy-two lots on six Bay Area properties were bought on the first day of sales. ^[20]

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, ^{[21] [22]} and Lighter Than Vanity, published exclusively in Russian by Eksmo. ^[23]