Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Join us on Sunday, April 18 at 6pm PT when Jonathon Keats is joined by Alla Efimova to discuss the new monograph, Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats, on Zoom!

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About Thought Experiments

Jonathon Keats’ work as an artist and thinker is compelling for our time. Keats poses critical questions, asks us to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions, and proposes radical methods of response. In a time when the environment and human lifeways are experiencing unprecedented change, thought leaders like Keats are needed to encourage us to consider possibilities—from the absurd to the profound. Since the turn of the millennium, Keats has comprehensively extended his academic training in philosophy by prolifically presenting conceptual art projects that he refers to as “thought experiments.” These include installations and performances in museums and galleries around the globe. His motivations are to make space for exploring ideas, offering provocations, and confronting systems we generally take for granted. By prototyping alternative realities—systematically asking “what if?”—these projects probe the world in which we live, exploring the potential for societal change.

About Alla Efimova

Alla Efimova, Ph.D., is a contemporary art curator and museum specialist with a background in critical theory. She is the founder and principal of KunstWorks, a consulting firm that addresses the growing need for legacy planning among artists of the post-war generation. As the former Director and Chief Curator of The Magnes at the University of California Berkeley, one of the largest museum collections of Jewish art and history, Efimova engaged cutting-edge scholars as guests curators and collaborators and commissioned important regional and international artists to create site-specific projects, including two works by Jonathon Keats. She also co-published two of his artist books together with Modernism Inc.: Yod the Inhuman and Zayin the Profane. Efimova is an author of several books and catalogs and has taught at the University of California Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine as well as the San Francisco Art Institute.

About Jonathon Keats

Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in the United States and Europe. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the award-winning author of four books of nonfiction on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press) – and three book-length works of fiction. A contributing editor to both Discover Magazine and Art & Antiques, he also authors a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a research fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, and an artist-in-residence at both the SETI Institute and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He serves as co-director and principal philosopher for Earth Law Center’s Interspecies Technology Transfer Consortium and as founding director and curator of the Museum of Future History. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

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