Jonathon Keats – Reciprocal Biomimicry

In recent years, engineers have designed body armor based on beetle shells and applied the aerodynamics of king sher beaks to bullet trains. Biomimicry is the buzzword, and the principle has served us well, but biomimicry rarely bene ts the organisms whose innovations we steal. On the contrary, humanity only uses these technologies to commandeer more of the planet.
To compensate, Jonathon Keats has founded The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative, the world’s first program dedicated to systematically adapting human technologies to bene t other organisms. This exhibition showcases plans and models for his representative innovations.

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist and writer based in the United States and Italy. Over the past two decades, his conceptually-driven interdisciplinary art projects have been hosted by institutions ranging from Arizona State University to the Long Now Foundation to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Keats is the author of six books, most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press, and the author of a weekly art column for Forbes.com. He was recently the Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina - Asheville, and is currently a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment, a Polar Lab Artist at the Anchorage Museum, and an Artist-in-Residence at both the Fraunhofer Institutes in Germany and UC Berkeley's Sagehen Creek Field Station in California. A monograph about his art is forthcoming from the Anchorage Museum and Hirmer Verlag.