A Creative Start
In making the decision to attend Amherst, Keats noted what many current students also value in the College: "Amherst sounded like a place where there was extreme opportunity to study what interested me without anything getting in the way." Not prone to following traditional rules of educational structure at the university level, Keats valued the open philosophy towards learning always present at the College. He also appreciated his ability to direct his own education through the support of professors and the accommodating nature of the administration: "It was there to facilitate, not to get in the way." The small size of the College and the opportunity presented by the Five Colleges were also draws for Keats.
It was in his second semester at the College that Keats took his first philosophy course (concerning the philosophy of science) with Professor of Philosophy Alexander George. Keats quickly became fascinated by "what we believe we know and how we believe we know it" and eventually became a philosophy major. A particular interest in aesthetics was ignited by a class taken with Professor Emeritus of Philosophy William Kennick, eventually leading Keats to a unique senior thesis project: a proto-novel titled "The Model" which dealt with themes of philosophy and aesthetics. The piece worked from within rather than being an abstraction. This non-traditional project led Keats to create a department of aesthetics with faculty from the philosophy, English, creative writing and art departments. Keats explains that this project has become a model for his work ever since, taking him from academic philosophy toward a method of "direct engagement" which presents a form of relevance not seen in more traditional philosophy.
From East to West
Following his graduation in 1994, Keats moved to San Francisco and worked for several years at Soma, an art magazine which he used to "explore the city [and] the culture through the mechanism of journalism and criticism." Keats began his work in the food section. Convincing the Editor-in-Chief and an experienced food critic that he in fact had knowledge of food (which he did not), Keats was hired to edit the food section, survived an upheaval of the editorial staff and, less than six months after graduating from Amherst, was hired as Editor-in-Chief. Keats worked at Soma for several years, directing the magazine as an "experimental platform" for art in the forms of food, performance, music, fashion, cinema and literature while simultaneously writing his first novel, "The Pathology of Lies." He continues to write as a critic for magazines and other publications, partially for economic purposes but also as a way of "researching" and "experimenting." Keats is currently working on a collection of fables.
Thought Experiments
Despite his credentials from written work for publications as well as creative novels, Keats is perhaps best known for his innovative conceptual art, "thought experiments" that seek to create "situations in which ideas bleed out through peoples' reactions and interactions."
One of Keats' first major endeavors, commissioned in 2002 by the city of Berkeley, Calif, for their annual art show, was to pass a Law of Logic which could not be broken and could not be challenged. Keats petitioned for the Law of Identity (A=A), which stated that any entity found not to be identical to itself could be fined up to one-tenth of a cent. Although the law did not pass, the project was not a failure: The point of this, and in fact of all of Keats' conceptual art projects, is not the result but the interplay between observers that "plays out on the streets."
Finding God
In the following year, Keats sought to "obtain mortality" by copyrighting his own mind under the argument that it is a "sculptural work formed through the art of thinking." This copyright gives Keats the rights to his mind and thoughts for 70 years following his death. The artist reasons that, by licensing out these rights, he can fulfill the Carteoran maxim "I think, therefore I am." In essence, he can remain alive for 70 years after his death. Keats has chosen to liquidate his brain to an Initial Public Offering (IPO) which sells future contracts on Keats' neurons with promised delivery seven days after his death. He is careful to note that buyers are obtaining only his neurons, not his networks of thought. With this project Keats explores the mind-body dichotomy.
Keats has also looked for God in exploring the connections between science and religion. Although no longer active in the project, the artist was a catalyst in launching the search for God's DNA in an attempt to find the divine being's place on the phylogenetic tree. The project began very simply: Walking down the street one day, Keats began to wonder what species God would be and the question persisted. Keats explains that the origin of his projects tend to be "a question that is perhaps a little naïve, but the more [he tries] to dismiss it the more it persists." Subsequently, he formed the International Association for Divine Taxonomy. He eventually took a place at a lab bench and attempted to genetically engineer God. Using the process of continuous in vitro evolution, Keats was able to apply environmental pressures (in this case prayer) on populations of cyanobacteria, thought to be the origin of life on Earth, and also to fruit flies, observing which ones appeared God-like. Keats took note of omnipresence (increased population sizes) in the test groups and published his results (the cyanobacteria displayed greater population increases), spurring more individuals to continue research and inspiring conversation and debate. Again, Keats' goal was not so much to discover the genome and phylogenetic history of God, but to allow "many possible ports of entry" for discussion of "what science can do and what religion can claim," even raising questions as to the very fundamentals of what man means by existence.
Recent Experiments
Keats has recently expanded himself into the realm of film and video, creating pornography for plants. Noting the over-abundance of film already available to human populations, Keats seeks a new audience in plants, an "ideal" demographic because of their ability to absorb and photosynthesize light. Unsure of his audience's interests, Keats opted to go with the universality of sex and began filming cross-pollination between plants, delivering the piece in a black and white silhouette meant to mimic how plants interact with the world around them through light and shadow. Keats showed his film in a theater in Chico, Calif., projecting his porn directly onto 90 rhododendron plants for three weeks. Keats hopes to perform the project on a larger scale by projecting his film onto outdoor trees, and is also looking to open other plant cinemas, perhaps even in Amherst!
Keats also spent time in Berlin in early October installing what could be best called an "art experience" at a gallery there. "The art was the experience of buying the art," explains Keats. Patrons arriving at the gallery paid what they wished, and a red sticker was placed on a wall to indicate the "art" had been purchased. The patrons were in fact buying the experience of purchasing art, an experience which Keats claims can be owned and even resold. Keats cites that the goal of shopping is often not the final product but the sheer experience of browsing and buying, an experience this installation attempts to re-create.
The Artist and His Work
Keats seeks to create situations that ask questions, but he himself does not expect to provide answers to these inquiries. The artist claims his answers would be "boring" (one may beg to differ with him on this point), but he also does not wish to halt the flow of questions and answers among observers. He will be the facilitator, though not necessarily a participant. "I don't really know what I'm doing," Keats claims. "I'm trying to examine what we take for granted." Keats views his work as an open source and takes no ownership, explaining that he wishes only to "make the obvious less obvious" or "make the invisible visible." He also draws no divisional lines between his art and his writing or even his journalism. "I'm taking what's out there and creating my own framework, "he said, explaining that in this framework processes work themselves out, ask the public questions and allow the answers to evolve into new questions and new projects.
"Never let yourself be taught anything, but learn it for yourself," Keats said after a pause, one of few in a conversation which streamed from food critics to God to plant porn without break. "Never learn it so well that it gets taken for granted." Keats' advice to current Amherst students is not unexpected from an artist whose goal is to call into question that which humankind takes for granted."
Keats does not presume to have all the answers or even to know all the questions, but hopes to, through his work, lead others to make these conclusions and inquiries for themselves. Keats' work at Amherst was only the beginning of what has been, and what continues to be, a life of curiosity. The artist explains, "Amherst was just the beginning of a lifelong process of education, the essence of which is investigation."