Jonathon Keats Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“...there's no reason why scholarship can't be as seriously playful as bubble-blowing.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Reason Why #Scholarship #No Reason

“My work is very eclectic. I write books that range from writing fiction, writing fable where I am very directly trying to imagine alternate worlds, to writing about [Buckminster] Fuller who was the ultimate world man creating all sorts of alternate worlds and believing that they were imminent to my own work of - for instance, a project that I've been working on for some year and a half, two years now that continues to evolve has been what I call Deep Time Photography.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Photography #Believe #Book

“We are not evolved really very well to be able to understand or to be able to work with and grapple with technologies that we have.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Technology #Able #Wells

“[Buckminster] Fuller said that everything at the time was basically a horse and buggy in the form of an automobile and it had that boxiness and basically aeronautics hadn't been invented.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Horse #Buckminster Fuller #Form

“I invented a camera that has an exposure time of one hundred years and the camera works in the simplest possible terms, because anything more complicated is more likely to break down in one way or another. It's a pinhole camera that lets in very low light and instead of exposing film, which is going to spoil within a matter of days or weeks, I'm using ordinary black paper.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Light #Years #Black

“I 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

#Play #World #Layers

“I don't know whether what I do is art. But making things out in the world and having as many conversations as possible.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Art #World #Conversation

“I don't have a cell phone. I am not a Luddite.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Phones #Cells #Cell Phone

“I select my technology based on what I need and I also don't take up what I don't feel that I need.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Technology #Needs #Select

“I think that as a society as well, we need to be smart about what technologies we take up and how construe progress.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Smart #Thinking #Technology

“I studied philosophy in school, became disgruntled by the fact that it was a way to have a very interesting conversation with very few people about very few things in very narrow terms and yet still believed (and still believe today) that there was something that I was getting myself involved in when I said I wanted to study philosophy.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Philosophy #Believe #School

“I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Perspective #Buckminster Fuller #Today

“I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Taken #Opposites #Trying

“I'm not especially interested in the job of the historian or journalist of trying to figure out what was true and what was not.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Jobs #Trying #Figures

“The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Mean #Cities #Talking

“I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Thinking #Air #Way

“You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Engineering #Insanity #Planets

“It'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 Keats

#Art #Practice #Research

“At this point in history, the desperate need for building a sustainable society and for managing energy usage makes for a really - of vast importance that we need to place on where we live and how we live in those places.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Energy #Needs #Desperate

“I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Thinking #Talking #Domes

“[Buckminster] Fuller's idea of progress is a very 1950s organization man out of the military sort of idea of progress. So as a result, you have something like: we've got bad weather in New York City; let's put a dome over it. And so I don't want to put a dome over Manhattan and I hope that nobody who ends up reading the book wants to do so as a result.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#New York #Military #Book

“That first of all feeds into what I do and secondly, it is emblematic of what I hope to achieve through what I do. That is to say all those conversations that are a result of it are the sorts of conversations that I think are the ultimate, most valuable by-product of what I'm doing.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Thinking #Firsts #Achieve

“I would say that by being irresponsibly disorganized, by saying yes to everything and then seeing how it all works out, that I end up in some place closer to where I had imagined I would be, before I started to study philosophy, than I would ever be had I followed through in any sort of responsible way, and become the professor of philosophy that I shudder to think I might potentially have become.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Philosophy #Thinking #Work Out

“Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Technology #Thinking #Talking

“Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Optimistic #Thinking #Years

“I don't think that I am hopeful because I have some data that you don't, that I am going to share with you and going to convince you on that basis.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Thinking #Data #Hopeful

“I 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 Keats

#Mean #Reality #Anything And Everything

“It 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 Keats

#Thoughtful #Trying #Matter

“I 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 Keats

#Thinking #Way #Connections

“I don't really know what that job [experimental philosopher] entails.”
-- Jonathon Keats

#Jobs #Philosopher #Knows