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Artist Profile
Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer who explores all aspects of society through multidisciplinary projects that draw on methods from both the natural sciences and the humanities. He is a research associate at the College of Fine Arts at the University of Arizona, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, chief philosopher at the Earth Law Center, artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and Biosphere 2, and co-director of the Consortium for Climate Adapted Architectural Heritage at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics. Keats has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University, from the Triennale di Milano to SXSW, and from CERN to UNESCO. He is the author of six books on topics ranging from science to art and writes an online art column for Forbes.
Artwork
Assembly of Trees
What if trees could vote? Which policies would they support? Would conditions in Munich be improved? Would Earth be a better environment for all life, including humankind?
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Homo sapiens is the most powerful species on Earth. Human political decisions impact all living beings. Many of the choices we’ve made over the past several centuries have been ruinous. Adding insult to injury, our species has taken power undemocratically. Humans are but a small minority in terms of biodiversity, and we’re far less than one percent of the planetary biomass.
The Assembly of Trees is the first polling agency in Europe devoted exclusively to measuring and publicizing the political perspective of flora. In this space, you’ll observe changes in arboreal stress level, indicating trees’ level of satisfaction with the political status quo. On the basis of these biological indications, you will be asked to evaluate changes in the legal code from a botanical point of view.
〷◠‿◠〷 With kind support from the Anita Keijzer Foundation.
