People

Jonathon Keats

Jonathon Keats

Experimental Philosopher, Artist, and Writer; 2023 Berggruen Fellow

Biography

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. 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 is the author of a weekly online arts column for Forbes. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, a visiting scholar at San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. A monograph about his work at the intersection of philosophy and art, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag. 

As a Berggruen Fellow, Keats is researching ecocentric governance and law, as well as more-than-human involvement in future political systems. This research will inform the development of a multispecies constitution.

composed by Arswain
machine learning consultation by Anna Tskhovrebov
commissioned by the Berggruen Institute
premiered at the Bradbury Building
downtown Los Angeles
april 22, 2022

Human perception of what sounds “beautiful” is necessarily biased and exclusive. If we are to truly expand our hearing apparatus, and thus our notion of beauty, we must not only shed preconceived sonic associations but also invite creative participation from beings non-human and non-living. We must also begin to cede creative control away from ourselves and toward such beings by encouraging them to exercise their own standards of beauty and collaborate with each other.

Movement I: Alarm Call
‘Alarm Call’ is a long-form composition and sound collage that juxtaposes, combines, and manipulates alarm calls from various human, non-human, and non-living beings. Evolutionary biologists understand the alarm call to be an altruistic behavior between species, who, by warning others of danger, place themselves by instinct in a broader system of belonging. The piece poses the question: how might we hear better to broaden and enhance our sense of belonging in the universe? Might we behave more altruistically if we better heed the calls of – and call out to – non-human beings?

Using granular synthesis, biofeedback, and algorithmic modulation, I fold the human alarm call – the siren – into non-human alarm calls, generating novel “inter-being” sonic collaborations with increasing sophistication and complexity. 

Movement II: A.I.-Truism
A synthesizer piece co-written with an AI in the style of Vangelis’s Blade Runner score, to pay homage to the space of the Bradbury Building.

Movement III: Alarmism
A machine learning model “learns” A.I.Truism and recreates Alarm Call, generating an original fusion of the two.

Movement IV: A.I. Call
A machine learning model “learns” Alarm Call and recreates A.I.Truism, generating an original fusion of the two.

RAVE (IRCAM 2021) https://github.com/acids-ircam/RAVE