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).
Mark and Jonathon had never met before this conversation. But they were familiar withe each others’ work.
Mark is a quite extraordinary photographer who, amongst other projects, has experimented with capturing time in various ways in his work. One example of this is the “Rephotographic Survey Project” that started with the idea of tracking down the uncertain locations of historical nineteenth-century survey photographs of the American West, and then creating new photographs at those sites that were meant to duplicate the original images.
Jonathon, in contrast, is known for his work in capturing the passage of time through long exposures — in the case of his millennial cameras, exposures of 1000 years!
The exquisite contrast of capturing a place at two discrete points in time, and capturing what happens between two points, led to a quite amazing conversation between Mark and Jonathon — one that spiralled off in exquisitely unexpected directions.
Listening to the conversation, I was struck by how I was listening to two artists creating art as they talked with each other — two artists with a complex relationship with time who, at this point in time, were very much in the moment.
Mark Klett
Mark Klett is a photographer interested in the intersection of places, history and time. His background includes working as a geologist before turning to photography. Klett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. His work has been exhibited and published in the United States and internationally, and is held in over eighty museum collections worldwide. He is the author/co-author of nineteen books including Seeing Time, Forty Years of Photographs (University of Texas Press 2020). Klett is Regents’ Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University.
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.
Mark Klett and Jonathon Keats on Time Machines, Millennium Cameras, and Other Philosophical Instruments for Mental Time Travel