Part of a series of intimate conversations between leading thinkers around the theme of “Chronodiversity, other minds, and the temporal dimensions of consciousness” and co-hosted with the ASU’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science).
Jonathon and Ron had met previously and were familiar with each others’ work, but hadn’t had the chance to sit down are deeply explore their ideas together before. As a result, this was a unique chance for them to get to know each other and their thoughts and ideas better.
The result is a quite compelling and unexpected conversation that reveals deep synergies between their ideas and work. Listening to it, I was riveted by how they connected the concepts of biodiversity and “chronodiversity” and how this led to an incredibly generative conversation.
Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist and experimental philosopher acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic. He is best known for his large-scale thought experiments.
Over his career he has produced a library for extraterrestrial beings (to share resources to overcome common existential threats), made fountains with meteorite-doped water (to induce alien hybridity for shared otherness), made a living calendar with a 5,000 lifespan, sold real estate in the extra dimensions of space-time proposed by string theory (selling 172 extra-dimensional lots in the Bay Area in a single day); and made an attempt to genetically engineer God (the attempt reveals God is most likely related to a cyanobacterium). These and other works have been 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.
His bold experiments raise serious questions and put into practice his conviction that the world needs more “curious amateurs”, willing to explore publicly whatever intrigues them, in defiance of a culture that increasingly forecloses on wonder and siloes knowledge into narrowly defined areas of expertise.
Ron Broglio
Ron's research focuses on how philosophy, art, and literature can help us rethink our relationship to the environment. The goal is to explore nonhuman comportment and thought through physical and representational engagement with animals and the landscape. Ron is best known for nonhuman phenomenology and animal revolution.
In Conversation With … is a series of intimate conversations between creative thinkers and leading experts as they explore the intersection of technology, the future, and what it means to be human.
Recorded on February 15, 2024 in ASU’s Future of Being Human initiative multipurpose space. Production: Sean Leahy.
Jonathon Keats and Ron Broglio on Chronodiversity and Biodiversity