Democracy Engine (Blueprint), by Jonathon Keats, 2012-2024.
The Future Democracies Laboratory
September 14th – Feb 23rd
A Project by Jonathon Keats
Elaine Cardinale Project Room
In the United States and around the world, democracy is in peril. Caught up in partisan gridlock, and often indulging in corruption or bigotry, all too many politicians are unable or unfit to govern. What if we automated governance, generating laws without legislators? What if citizenship were expanded to enfranchise nonhuman animals and plants? These are some of the core questions addressed by The Future Democracies Laboratory. This immersive exhibition is the first public showcase of the lab’s provocative experiments, undertaken initially with San José State University’s student body under the guidance of Digital Media Arts adjunct professor Steve Durie. From a digital legislature to polling apparatus enlisting ripe bananas, the speculative systems prototyped in the Future Democracies Laboratory seamlessly combine science, technology, and art to address some of the greatest challenges of our time.
– Jonathon Keats, Artist and Experimental Philosopher
Programs and exhibitions at the ICA are made possible with thanks to generous support from the City of San José’s Office of Cultural Affairs, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the San Francisco Foundation; significant support from Applied Materials, the Lipman Family Foundation, and Yvonne and Mike Nevens; along with additional support from SVCreates.
About Jonathon Keats:
Photo Credit: Jen Dessinger
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. 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 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. He is currently a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, research fellow at the Highland Institute, consulting philosopher at Earth Law Center and the Museum of Tomorrow, Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, and artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He serves as curatorial director of the Museum of Future History, and is a member of the Berggruen Institute’s Planetary Governance Working Group. A monograph about his art, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.