Bestiaries of the More-Than-Humane
Through field observations and laboratory experimentation, biologists have shown that nonhuman primates evaluate fairness in terms similar to humans, and that rats manifest humanlike reciprocity in their social arrangements.
This arts research workshop will explore lessons in ethics to be learned from creatures, providing a space for creative expression of the more-than-humane. Guided by Jonathon Keats and Alice Gorman, participants will evaluate the lifeways of animals and plants and fungi they know personally, deriving guidance that might be applied to the human domain. Each participant will then narrate what one of the creatures has to teach in a small hand-crafted book inspired by medieval bestiaries.
Presented by: Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts
Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in the United States and Europe. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities.
Keats has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University, and from SXSW 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, published by Oxford University Press—and is the author of a weekly online art and design column for Forbes.