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. 

Keats has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University, and from SXSW 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 is the author of 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. 

Keats is currently a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange artist at Flux Projects, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, 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 is the founding director and curator of the Museum of Future History. A monograph about his art is forthcoming from Hirmer Verlag. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Research Interests

Experimental philosophy, astrobiology, SETI, more-than-human collaborations, arts research