*The guy's CV is getting longer than his interventions.
For Immediate Release
contact: [email protected]
SAN FRANCISCO BUILDS ASTROPHYSICS LAB FOR GIFTED MICROBES
City Hosts World's First Celestial Observatory For Single-Cell
Organisms... Cyanobacteria To Access Hubble Telescope Via Custom
Video Feed... Administrators Expect Microbes To Solve Greatest
Scientific Puzzle Of Modern Era
January 16, 2012 - After a century of intellectual shortcoming by
humans, bacteria will be given the chance to discover fundamental laws
of physics in California this month. A newly-announced Microbial
Academy of Sciences will employ more than a billion independent
researchers. According to project administrator Jonathon Keats, San
Francisco is the first city in the world to open a scientific
institution exclusively for the benefit of microorganisms.
"Until today science has been completely dominated by one species,"
says Keats, an experimental philosopher and former director of the
Local Air & Space Administration. (((If you don't think that's hilarious,
I don't even wanna talk to you.))) "The human mind is impressive, but
our brains are limited by the way they're made. Scientists keep trying
to formulate a theory of everything, and all they get are headaches."
People may not be biologically equipped to understand the universe at
a fundamental level, he contends. "Other species might be better
adapted to the task."
Keats believes that the most promising candidates are bacteria. "For
years scientists have been saying that the theory of everything must
be very simple," he argues. "Yet the more we work to unify the forces
of nature, the more complex our theories get." Quantum mechanics takes
reams of mathematics to explain subatomic behavior, yet fails to
account for the astronomically-large phenomena explained by general
relativity. Attempts to tie together cosmic and subatomic observations
result in even more complicated explanations such as string theory.
"Clearly we're overthinking things," says Keats. "Our brains are too
complex to comprehend the underlying simplicity of the universe.
Cyanobacteria are not burdened by all that gray matter." In other
words, their superior intellect is a byproduct of their apparent
stupidity.
"But they need facilities," says Keats. While their minuscule size
lets them experience quantum phenomena on a first-hand basis, they
have no natural way of exploring the galaxies. For that reason, Keats
has obtained funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission to build a
celestial observatory in the Arts Commission Gallery.
Privy to construction plans, Arts Commission gallery director Aimee Le
Duc explains that "rows of petri dishes filled with brackish water -
teeming with cyanobacteria - will be set up atop a flat screen monitor
laid flat on its back. The monitor will glow with images of the cosmos
provided by the Hubble Telescope."
"Because cyanobacteria can perform photosynthesis," Keats elaborates,
"they'll be able to detect patterns of starlight just as human
scientists do with their eyes. The difference will not be in their
methodology, but rather in the conclusions they reach."
Keats willingly admits that we may never know what the microbes
discover. "They don't speak our language, and they're not about to
publish their findings in The Astrophysical Journal," he concedes.
Even if they did elucidate a theory of everything, people almost
certainly wouldn't understand it. "But how many people really
understand Einstein?" he asks. "What matters is that the universe is
understood, not that the knowledge belongs to any one of us."
. . .
The Microbial Academy of Sciences will be open from January 20 to
April 14, 2012 at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. More
information: www.sfartscommission.org/gallery
. . .
Acclaimed as "a poet of ideas" by the New Yorker, Jonathon Keats is an
experimental philosopher and artist based in the United States and
Italy. Recently he opened a photosynthetic restaurant for plants at
the Crocker Art Museum. He has also exhibited extraterrestrial
abstract art at the Judah L Magnes Museum, launched a stay-at-home
Local Air & Space Administration at California State University,
presented the nation's first ouija voting booth at the Berkeley Art
Museum, and attempted to genetically engineer God in collaboration
with scientists at the University of California. His projects have
been documented by PBS, NPR, and the BBC World Service, garnering
favorable attention in periodicals ranging from The Washington Post
and The San Francisco Chronicle, to Nature and New Scientist, to Flash
Art and ArtInfo. Additionally, Keats serves as the art critic for San
Francisco Magazine and as a columnist for Wired Magazine. He's the
author of two novels and an American Library Association award-winning
collection of stories published by Random House, as well as a book
about the co-evolution of language and science, "Virtual Words",
published by Oxford University Press last October. Since graduating
summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1994, he has been a visiting
artist at California and Montana State Universities, and a guest
lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as the
recipient of Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships. He is represented by
Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. More information: contact
[email protected] or see
http://www.modernisminc.com/artists/Jonathon_KEATS/
