The CCP gallery will be the site of three workshops. designed by visiting artist/consultant Jonathon Keats in response to conversations with leadership in Research Innovation Impact (RII) Centers and Institutes. With participants’ consent objects made in the workshops will be added to the exhibition. Register now! Each workshop will be limited to 20 people.
About Jonathon Keats | Thought Experiments Forbes
Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer, and experimental philosopher whose conceptually driven multimedia 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 author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and has been an art critic for Forbes for more than a decade. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, a visiting scholar at San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and Hyundai, and consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center. A monograph about his work at the intersection of philosophy and art, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag.
Read more about the workshops:
In the final paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin famously marveled that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Although his awe was merited (as anyone who has spent time on this planet can attest), many more life forms have not evolved than have. Even the most scientific mind is liable to take for granted the direction evolution has taken, or at least be challenged to imagine what might have happened over the past couple billion years – but didn’t.
What forms most beautiful and most wonderful might be found in an alternative fossil record? What might the fossils on a second Earth look like? What might be discovered elsewhere in the universe, where life might have taken a different course, addressing different challenges or finding different ways to cope? The effort to imagine these possibilities can not only guide the search for life off Earth, and our sensitivity to extraterrestrial biosignatures, but also make us more appreciative of our own capabilities and limitations. The practice might even expand the gamut of biomimicry from the actual to the speculative. These alternative ways of being could have real-world value as our climate undergoes radical change, straining the evolved capacities of humans and other species.
In a two-hour arts research workshop led by Jonathon Keats, participants will create fossils speculatively representing organisms from imagined worlds. The workshop will begin with an opportunity to handle actual fossils, and to explore the possibility space of adaptation through their physical organization using combinatory apparatus developed in The Library of the Great Silence to facilitate alternative ways of knowing. After finding gaps in what is, asking what if…? and evolving tentative answers in the imagination, participants will craft their imagined fossils in clay. These fossils will be exhibited together with the real ones, arranged in the combinatory apparatus to evoke the larger possibility space.
Subsequent to the workshop, plaster molds of the clay fossils may be made, so that the fossils can be fabricated in quantity and distributed for future reference. Buried underground to be found by future generations – human and perhaps extraterrestrial – they will fossilize our dreams and invite finders to envision endless other beautiful and wonderful possibilities.
“In this age of specialization, men who thoroughly know one field are often incompetent to discuss another,” lamented Richard Feynman in a 1956 lecture at Caltech. In the sixty-seven years since Feynman observed the narrowing of academic disciplines and the adverse impact of expertise on intellectual flexibility, the problem has only grown more acute, even as the challenges confronting society grow increasingly complex.
Transdisciplinary collaboration has been advanced as a solution, and become the core of fields ranging from environmental science to medicine. Yet researchers often struggle to understand one another, to articulate and to interpret grand challenges that nobody can solve on their own. The problem space cannot be shared unless there’s a lingua franca.
The arts have largely been spared from the rage for specialization. In fact, visual art is significantly less conditioned by specialized training today than it was in the 19th century, when the academy prepared painters and sculptors to ply their trade according to narrow cultural expectations. Ever since Marcel Duchamp put a urinal on a pedestal in 1917, playfully upsetting the artistic orthodoxy, anything at all could qualify as art. By necessity, the artist became an artisan of ideas. Art became metadisciplinary.
Can the metadisciplinary nature of art facilitate exchange between specialized contemporary disciplines including the natural and social sciences? Can art be the Esparanto of transdisciplinarity? This two-hour experimental workshop will seek answers by exploring a novel methodology for transdisciplinary exchange using sculpture as a common language for playful intellectual exploration.
Artistic competence is not required, at least not in any academic sense. On the contrary, the workshop will forefront the potential of artistic expression to extract practitioners from the familiarity of expertise. Participants will be challenged to reconstitute the questions their discipline cannot answer in a form that their closest colleagues would scarcely recognize yet even a layman could apprehend. Assembled from scrap materials, and creatively engaging symbolism and metaphor – and perhaps a small dose of confusion – these sculptures will then become the raw material for spirited interaction with people from other disciplines.
Although this collaborative reworking is unlikely to generate a solution in the short span of the workshop, the collective reformulation of the problem is likely to provide insights into what is being asked and who can help work it out, as well as practice in the metadisciplinary play of ideas.
Sculptures made in the workshop will subsequently be publicly displayed. The exhibition will serve not only to show the preliminary results of this experiment but also to attract potential collaborators who might otherwise never have been engaged.
Through field observations and laboratory experimentation, biologists have shown that nonhuman primates evaluate fairness in terms similar to humans, and that rats manifest humanlike reciprocity in their social arrangements. Based on this evidence, researchers have made persuasive arguments that nonhuman animals are ethical beings.
Might some predilections of nonhuman species be more ethically advanced than our own? Might their lifeways reveal areas in which humans have never even considered the need for principled behavior? Until very recently in geological time, hominids were quite limited in their habitat; we’re imperfectly evolved to manage the planet we now dominate, as current planetary conditions make readily apparent. Other species have abundant knowledge and experience that we lack. They offer a plethora of ways of being that we’d be foolish to neglect. For instance, what might humans learn from the collectivist lifeways of termite colonies? What morals might be gleaned from the symbioses of lichens?
More-than-human ethical principles have the potential to be transformational. They can inspire greater goodness in people and align values across taxa for the greater good of all on a local and planetary level.
This two-hour arts research workshop will explore lessons in righteousness to be learned from creatures of the Sonoran Desert, providing a space for creative expression of the more-than-humane. Guided by Jonathon Keats, participants will evaluate the lifeways of animals and plants and fungi they know personally, deriving guidance that might be applied to the human domain. Each participant will then narrate what one of the creatures has to teach in a small hand-crafted book inspired by medieval bestiaries.
Subsequent to the workshop, the books will be temporarily displayed in a miniature library where the public will have the opportunity to learn from desert flora and fauna, and to contribute books of their own making. Over the longer term, the ethical principles will be entered into an archive of the more-than-humane, which will serve as a critical resource for research conducted by Keats and colleagues on new legal models to reflect and protect the values of nature.
The workshop involving artistic interaction with nonhuman species can elucidate and moderate human cognitive biases such as hyperbolic discounting, which are some of the leading causes of the climate crisis. And the rights and representation of nature workshop can nurture a constituency to support the changes they envision.
Schedule - Gallery Talks , October 24
2:00-2:30 “100-Year Photography: From Today to the Future” (Hai Ren)
How can art enact discussions of the future in rural China?
2:30-2:45 “Dear Body of Water: A Poetic Water-Harvesting Project” (Gretchen Henderson)
How might we cultivate care for overlooked ecologies including bodies of water, both far afield and right where we are?
2:45-3:00 “The Wonder Studio” (Nicole Antebi, Aaron Bugaj, Betsy Arnold)
Can moving images and imaging systems offer a platform for investigating the connections between artistic expression and scientific study?
3:00-3:30 “America's Health: Welcome to the Game” (Yuri Makino, Christine Ryan
Harland)
How do community-based healthcare models transform our sick care system into an affordable, accessible and high-quality model?
4:00-4:30 “Documenting Resilience in Tucson’s Southside” (Selina Barajas, Jacqueline Barrios,
Meg Jackson Fox, Kenny Wong)
How does Tucson’s Southside envision resilience?
3:30-4:00 “The Nature of Change: Experiments in Societal Transformation Through Environmental Art (Carissa DiCindio, Jonathon Keats, Jenna Green)
How can artistic practices engage communities with local ecology in Tucson?
4:30-5:00 “Southwest Field Studies in Writing” (Susan Briante, Francisco Cantú)
How can university/nonprofit partnerships empower writers and artists to engage in reciprocal learning in the borderlands?”