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).
This was the last in this series of conversations around chronodiversity with Jonathon Keats and others, and ended up being a particularly poignant place to finish.
Liz and Jonathon hadn’t met each other before the recording session, and weren’t familiar with each other’s work. Knowing them both, I intentionally set things up this way as I was interested in what the process of getting to know each other would produce.
I must confess that I was nervous, and at a few points in the conversation I wondered if I should intervene.
I’m glad I didn’t, as what unfolds is at times intimate, uncertain, revelatory, and deeply compelling.
At the end of the conversation I asked if they wanted to touch on any final topics, and to my surprise Liz brought up her deep concerns with the situation in Palestine, and her personal challenges in grappling with how to make sense of the situation.
Th resulting last few minutes are deeply moving in their uncertainty and vulnerability. Both Liz and Jonathon were very gracious in letting us into this very personal conversation — it’s something that should be listened to, respected, and pondered.
Liz Lerman
Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.
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.
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.
Liz Lerman and Jonathon Keats on The Art of Memory and the Act of Being Present