Experimental philosopher, artist and author Jonathon Keats, famous for outrageous projects like genetically engineering deity and selling shares of his brain, this week revealed his latest thought-provoking endeavor — a millennium camera designed to take the slowest photograph in history.
One such low-tech device created by Keats, basically a copper tube with a small, 24-carat gold aperture, is anchored to a third-floor terrace at the Arizona State University Art Museum and aimed directly at downtown Tempe. Over the next 10 centuries, light will sneak through a pinhole and gradually etch a single image into the rose madder paint on the camera's back wall. Nothing fleeting will be captured, only the constant reflection of the landscape — buildings, streets and perhaps long-living trees. Keats has also installed one at Amherst College in Massachusetts, where he studied philosophy.
Keats, who lives in San Francisco and northern Italy, introduced 100-year-exposure cameras in 2014 in Berlin. While Keats approaches his thought experiments with the sincerity and eagerness of one who expects them to succeed, the projects serve to stoke conversation and curiosity regardless of their outcome. If anyone is around to open the capsules in 1000 years, the images could provide an astounding visual history.
"It is as much about the conceptual as it is about the photographic," Keats said. "Acting in the present according to an awareness of the future ... can profoundly change the way we see and interact with the world. In a small way, the millennium camera is similar to a microscope or a telescope in that it extends a person's view,” Keats said. "Those were extending for the eye; this is extending for the mind's eye," he said.
In this workshop, Keats will bring an improved version of his camera and will help participants make their own.
Tickets are non-refundable.
Design Week 2018 Day Sponsor: KPB Architecture.