I think that in the first place, why we can get excited about [Buckminster ] Fuller, why it's plausible that people might - why my publisher would publish this book [You belong to the universe] about it long after he's dead and irrelevant by many standards has to do with the fact that he was in a sense coming up with this job for himself that is the job that we now refer to when we speak about world change.
Jonathon KeatsI work on everything all at once, which is maybe the worst way to go about it. But I think that actually it works really well in terms of the serendipitous connections between all of these many different projects and these many different realms.
Jonathon KeatsI didn't grow up with [Buckminster Fuller]. I never met him. I was once close to meeting him as a child at a ski resort one summer. He died in 1983. Only in 1999 or so, 2000, when I was working as an editor at San Francisco Magazine, did I really come back around to that name because Stanford University had just acquired the archive.
Jonathon KeatsIt's essential for me to be working on a nonfiction sort of research project simultaneous with multiple projects that are in different realms of art practice or not.
Jonathon KeatsIt isn't a matter of hope. It's a matter of - between the options of trying nothing and trying something, let's try something but let's also be very thoughtful about what that something is.
Jonathon KeatsI set my life since then attempting to figure out how to do that, basically how to have a sort of public discourse in which anything and everything are open to conversation and in which the thought experiment is a means by which to posit all manner of different realities, potential futures.
Jonathon KeatsI would argue that search has made the world a better place. It has done so for reasons that arbitrarily could completely change that - not arbitrarily at all but to completely change how that plays out based upon the needs of profitability. So it's totally unreliable and it has many layers nested underneath that of many ulterior motives nested underneath it.
Jonathon Keats