Enlarging the Question

At the summit of eastern Nevada’s Mount Washington, a grove of bristlecone pine trees bears witness to millennia of change. Perched precariously along ridges of limestone, battered by harsh winds, the gnarled forms that populate Long Now’s Bristlecone Preserve can look more like abstract sculptures than living organisms. But they are alive, have been alive, some since before the first stone of the Great Pyramid of Giza was laid 4,500 years ago. And they are growing. Very. Slowly. A sapling from today would potentially not reach maturity until the year 07000. 

But to speak of years like 07000 is to speak in human time. Bristlecone time is not like our time. In 01964, a geographer took core samples of a nearby bristlecone known as Prometheus. The tree had 4,862 growth rings. This did not, as one might assume, mean that the tree was 4,862 years old. Because of the harsh conditions, and the high elevation, some bristlecone pines grow so slowly that they don’t form a tree ring each year. Such was the case with Prometheus, whom researchers later estimated to be closer to 4,900 years old. 

The discrepancy between human time — in which a year is exactly 365.2425 days in duration — and bristlecone time — which varies depending on environmental conditions — is the focus of a forthcoming project from the conceptual artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, The Long Now Foundation, and the Nevada Museum of Art. Centuries of the Bristlecone empowers the longest-lived organisms on Earth to be timekeepers. A living calendar for the next five millennia, the project will measure the growth of select bristlecone pine trees at Long Now’s Bristlecone Preserve. Those measurements — “bristlecone time” — will be transmitted to an 18-foot tall dual pendulum clock housed at the Nevada Museum of Art. The growth of these trees will tell a story. What that story is depends on us.

“Through time, each bristlecone will bear witness to human activity in the Anthropocene,” Keats has written. “The meaning of the living calendar will change with the changes we bring to the environment.”

Consider again that sapling. Over time, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stemming from anthropogenic climate change would lead to it growing at a faster rate, much like its siblings at lower elevations. A visitor to the Centuries of the Bristlecone clock a hundred years from now would see two different times displayed, side by side. The dial displaying human, or standard, time would read “02124.” The dial displaying bristlecone, or arboreal, time might read “02377.” 

Or it might not. We cannot know how the future will unfold. And we could, of course, choose to act differently. For Keats, that’s precisely the point. 

“Our actions will affect bristlecone time,” Keats writes. “And while we need to be aware of our hubris, we also need to be aware that we have choices and responsibilities. Arboreal time will provide us with an ecological feedback mechanism. Sentinels from the distant past that will long outlive us, the bristlecones will calibrate our time on this planet.”

Centuries of the Bristlecone has been in the works since 02015, when Keats shared his vision during a Long Now Talk at The Interval. In September 02024, a contingent of staff from Long Now and the Nevada Museum of Art joined Keats atop Mount Washington to help realize that vision, installing the indexes and plaques that will allow future citizen-timekeepers to chart the growth of the trees. In the spring of 02025, the municipal clock at the Nevada Museum of Art will open to the public. 

Centuries of the Bristlecone is part of Keats’ broader philosophical exploration of time from a more-than-human perspective. “The overarching goal is to reverse the process of human alienation that began by seeing nature as other,” he says. “We can reintegrate ourselves into nature by reintegrating nature into human systems.”

Recently, Keats sat down with William L. Fox, the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, to discuss the many projects he’s undertaken to achieve that goal, as well as the unconventional thought experiments that comprise his larger body of work. Over the years, Keats has attempted to genetically engineer God; copyright his brain in a bid to become immortal; and pass Aristotle’s law of identity as a law of the legal system (violators caught being unidentical to themselves would be fined one-tenth of a cent). He has created pinhole cameras with exposure times of one thousand years, and he has shown pornography to house plants (which is to say, videos of bees pollinating flowers). 

Equal parts playful and profound, Keats’ interventions open up spaces for the public to engage in contemplative inquiry across a wide swath of disciplines and domains, from the perennial questions posed by philosophy — What is the relationship between thinking and being? — to the ethical quandaries posed by the Anthropocene — How might non-human species participate in the collective decision-making of the democratic system in which we live?  

“A question is never resolved,” he says. “It is only enlarged.”

The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

William L. Fox: You and I have been working together for years, but we don’t sit down and actually talk about what childhood was like, what grade school was like. I’d like to remedy that now. So let’s start with how you must’ve driven every teacher you’ve ever had absolutely nuts.

Jonathon Keats: It started with my parents. I drove them crazy long before I had teachers to distract and classes to disturb. But in terms of the first experience in a formal educational situation, it was preschool. As is the case in many Montessori schools, I got told by the teachers how to be creative. What more creative thing can one do than to rebel against that?

It didn't go over well. I actually didn't speak for an entire year. I would speak outside of class, but the moment I walked through the doors of the school, I would stop speaking. Later, when I got my hands on a Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I was able to diagnose myself as having elective mutism. I was quite pleased with myself to be an elective mute because knowing when not to say something seems like it is as important as knowing when to say something. That is one of the essential qualities of my work and one of the essential qualities that I seek in art more generally.

As I went on in that vein, being obstinate whenever I was asked to be creative or imaginative, one of the preschool teachers asked whether I had an imagination. I think that's still open to debate. Nevertheless, it was clear that any sort of formal structure that came from someone else was one to be resisted or to be broken free of, as opposed to my own systems that I very much wanted to create.

The first work that could potentially be categorized retrospectively as an artwork — or as a thought experiment — came shortly after moving cross country from New York City, where I'd gone to preschool, to Corte Madera, a very quaint town in California. In my driveway, on a street that few people frequented, I set up a table and put some rocks on it and priced the rocks at one cent apiece. The rocks on the ground were identical, but were not the ones that were for sale, so they had no price on them whatsoever. And so I went into the business of selling rocks to a market that was effectively zero. There was, I think, a neighbor who came up to water the lawn at some point. But, more than a profit-making enterprise, my venture was a way in which to ask fundamental questions about economics, which probably originated with my puzzlement about what my father did for a living as a stockbroker. What does it mean to buy and sell? What is the nature of money?

Even then, the way in which I went about investigating the world was on my own terms, creating some sort of alternative reality that others could enter into with me, where I eliminated as much as possible that seemed extraneous, leaving just the essence to try to make sense of. I think that has been the case ever since.

Fox: The most valid rubric I use to describe you is as an ‘experimental philosopher.’ Clearly, that’s where you’ve been going since Montessori preschool. By the time you get to high school, have you begun, within that cloud of possibilities, to make some choices about what you want to do?

Keats: At the time, I was very interested in law and governance, which are deeply interesting to me still — not only as subjects, but also as constructs at a meta-level: How is the world ordered? What sort of sense do we make of the world through the systems we have, and how do we interrogate those systems? How do we ask how those systems work and what they do in order to speculate on the ways in which they might achieve what we actually want them to do?

All too often, there are legacy systems built on legacy systems, and they’re not functioning as intended. We can see this on a day-to-day basis, but we won’t understand why until we start to look at what is invisible to us. It’s like the operating system on a computer: We might not know how it operates, but it structures our word processing, our web browsing, et cetera. Law was a particularly interesting area for me because it was structured, and because it structured everything else.

During the summer of my junior year, I interned at the City Attorney’s Office in San Francisco.  They must not have been very well funded, because they would tell me about cases and then set me free in their law library to write memoranda that I would dictate into a Dictaphone. These were often on rather arcane areas of law, such as trademark infringement, but there were also more conventional problems, such as the liability of the city when a bus driver ran over a pedestrian. So I ended up with an informal education in the law, both in how the law is structured and how it actually functions.

In terms of actual schoolwork, I was very keen to go to the high school that I did — Lick-Wilmerding — for manifestly other reasons: it had a magnificent shop program, with a whole room of World War II-era lathes. That was useful not only from the standpoint of learning how to make things, but in terms of learning the procedures. When you're working in a machine shop, you have to think about what you are trying to create in a way that is extremely orderly, considering the stages underlying the manufacture of a given part and considering how multiple parts will fit together. So while I wasn't thinking in these terms at the time, in making things out of wood, metal, and other materials, I was, in very physical and tangible ways, trying to make sense of how systems come into being, what they do, and where they break down.

Fox: And you move on into college, and the adventures continue.

Keats: They do. They travel with me to the East Coast, to Amherst College in western Massachusetts. It was an ideal setting for exploring whatever interested me. That’s the nature of a liberal arts college when you take the mandate seriously, and most of my professors did. They were perfectly happy to provide guidance, but were seemingly equally happy not to do so, and to allow much of my education to become a form of independent study.

Amherst is where I learned philosophy, and where I learned that I did not want to practice philosophy within academia. Formal logic is not my forte. And then there was the fact that philosophy at Amherst was analytic and highly technical. And while I found Ludwig Wittgenstein fascinating — he once asked, What time is it on the sun? — for the most part the way in which philosophy was done in school was not at all like what I had imagined. What I had envisioned was probably not so far off from selling rocks on the street corner. As far as I was concerned, philosophy was about asking questions and enticing others to try and make sense of that world with me.

The thought experiment was, to me, an incredibly interesting means of making sense that was used in a way that was not at all interesting. It was used as a mode of argumentation — reductio ad absurdum — as a way of rhetorically drawing somebody into a state of contradiction. I was interested in the thought experiment as a mode of open-ended experimentation. And so I got enough training in philosophy — enough language, enough rigor — to be able to smuggle philosophy out of academia. Breaking free was also important for another reason: Whenever I talked to anybody outside of my department, including classmates and my parents, they had no idea what I was talking about. Partly, I think that’s because I was never very good at paraphrasing others’ philosophy, but partly it’s because analytic philosophy was so abstruse. 

As I said earlier, we need to get inside the operating system. We need to be able to understand the basis of our understanding. There's so much scholarship underlying philosophy as it's done right now that “good philosophy” is directed by what was considered worthy in the past.  We need to go in other directions, and to do so with others in a way that’s socially engaged, such that we’re all philosophers together.

I declared my independence from philosophy my senior year by opting to write a thesis on aesthetics, which was one of the areas I’d studied. In my proposal to the philosophy department, I argued that it made no sense to write about aesthetics; I should be working within aesthetics. That is, I should be writing a novel. The philosophy department responded by saying, That’s a very good idea, but not here. So I formed my own aesthetics department. I gave it a name and had a philosophy professor on the board. I wrote a novel, or something that passed as a novel, as a senior thesis. That was the moment when I realized that writing was one way in which to pursue what I wanted and needed to do. Writing fiction and poetry was particularly generative because it avoided some of the necessities of argumentation, namely first and foremost that one has something one is arguing for, as opposed to trying to open up a space for reflection.

But I also realized that beyond writing, other arts presented great opportunities. I had studied enough art history in college to see that the Duchampian turn was so dizzying that nobody knew what art was anymore. Every other discipline, from physics to philosophy, had become more disciplined, more rigorous, more rigid, and more narrow as time had gone on. Art had gone the opposite direction, from producing painting or sculpture in an academic tradition to “anything goes”.

Fox: You have just proposed a kind of analog to the working practice of Allan Kaprow and his relationship to William James and the birth of American pragmatism. Which is to say, in counter distinction: when I was at the Clark Art Institute, I had a good friend who was a curator of art from Bordeaux at the Contemporary Art Museum. He was the last student of Deleuze. And he said, “You don't like Deleuze and Guattari very much, do you?” And I said, “No, I loathe them. And in fact, I threw away A Thousand Plateaus.” It's the only book in my life I've ever thrown in a trash basket. And he said, “Why on earth? What's your problem?” And I said, “Because they don't tell the truth. They use language in very clever ways. But you cannot argue about whether or not there's a river that flows from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. And they would pretend to do otherwise.” And so he said, “But Bill, you don't understand: the whole point is the person who argues the best wins.” I found that instructive. And to hear you actually anchor yourself in the world in a philosophical tradition that is not founded on argumentation is refreshing.

Keats: I think that argumentation is at the core of my practice, but not for the sake of winning. I’m drawn to the Hegelian dialectic and even more to the Talmudic tradition in which any point is a basis for a counterpoint. A question is never resolved. It’s only enlarged.

What I do in much of my work now is that I take a position internally —  a proposition, a provocation, or a world that I create — not because I think that it is definitive, but because I think that it is a point of departure for navigating a space that I intuit to be meaningful, relevant and interesting. I seldom know my way around the space at the outset, I only know that I can’t navigate it alone. I know that it needs to be large enough for me to get lost.

In Berkeley in 02002, I tried to find my way through the legal system. I attempted to pass a law of logic: the proposition that a equals a, that every entity is identical to itself. I held a petition drive and set up a table piled high with political buttons. It wasn’t so different from my childhood experiment of setting up a stand on the street and selling rocks as a way of understanding what money is; the rocks were meaningless except for the transaction that was happening through their sale. Equivalent to that, in trying to pass a law of logic as legislation, I was trying to figure out whether we actually can make laws, or whether they already all exist and we simply elect certain laws to be those that we follow.

Fox: One of the things you’ve done is copyright your brain.

Keats: My motivation was to explore some of the questions that have persisted for such a long time: what it is to think, what it is to be, and what is the relationship between the two? But also it was about trying to figure out the nature of intellectual property.

Instead of trying to achieve immortality through the merits of my paintings or sculptures, as artists often do, I opted to enlist the Copyright Act of 01978, which afforded copyright protection on any work for 70 years beyond the artist’s death. I submitted paperwork to the Copyright Office registering my brain as a sculpture that was formed through the act of thinking. I hypothesized that this sculpture, by virtue of being copyrighted, and through the magic of cogito ergo sum, could become a way to outsurvive myself by 70 years.

At the same time that I registered my brain with the Copyright Office to protect the neural networks, I orchestrated an IPO offering futures contracts on my individual neurons. The neural networks were really what mattered after I was dead; the ability to use those networks after my death would be essential to fulfilling the cogito and continuing to exist exclusively as myself for those 70 years. But in order to be able to fund suitable technology, as well as suitable legal protections, I needed some sort of a cash windfall at the end of my life. (Being an artist, as we all know, is not a way to get rich.) Investors were offered the opportunity to purchase a million neurons at a $10 premium against a $10,000 strike price. The neurons were, and remain, deliverable upon my death.

Fox: I’d like to talk about trees. You and I have both been involved in the UC Berkeley Sagehen Creek Field Station that is north of Truckee, California. At one point, you wanted to allow trees to have agency about the quality of their environment, giving them the ability to vote in a countywide election. Jeff Brown and Faerthen Felix, the then-director and manager, respectively, of the Sagehen Creek Station, not only let you set up camp there, but brought you in contact with scientists and instruments that could facilitate that process.          

Keats: For a while I've been trying to figure out how to move beyond rights of nature. I’ve been trying to take a broader view of ecology, considering how we’re making life worse, not only for ourselves, but for most every species on planet Earth through our actions today and arguably since the Industrial Revolution.

From an ecological perspective, giving trees the right to clean air is certainly a step in the right direction: it allows for beings in jeopardy to be protected in a court of law, and their interests to be protected in very broad terms, much as rights apply to humans. But there is something essential missing from the equation, and it has to do with representation. In other words: how might non-human species be able to participate in the collective decision-making of the democratic system in which we live?

We don’t really know much about what happens on this planet, let alone what is in the best interest of non-human others. If we want to make good policy, we need to be able to access the extraordinary range of sensory systems and ways in which these non-human beings make sense of the world. And, at an ethical level, these others are affected by our actions, and should, therefore, have a say in what actions are taken.

When I first approached Jeff and Faerthen — and when they introduced me to Earth Law Center in Colorado — I was just beginning to develop ideas for enlarging democratic decision-making processes. Starting with plants made sense because of the fact that we humans are less than 1% of Earth’s biomass and plants are by some measures more than 80%. In other words, they’re the majority.

I started to think about plants’ participation in the democratic process initially in terms of an old electoral cliche : Are you better off now than you were four years ago? People supposedly ask themselves that question in presidential elections. How might we pose that question to plants?

I think the question could be reformulated as follows: Are you getting more stressed or less so as a result of the political decisions that are being made on your behalf in our representative democracy? All species can be monitored in terms of stress level. The hormone cortisol, for instance, is correlated with stress in the case of animals. Plants experience stress as well, as indicated by their production of phytohormones such as ethylene. Measuring these hormones might be a substitute for lining up plants at the voting booth and waiting for them to pull a lever.

It’s a thought experiment, but one I am undertaking in public at MOD, an art-and-science museum at the University of South Australia. All this year in Adelaide, 50 trees are being monitored. We aren't monitoring phytohormones, which are difficult to measure directly. Instead, we’re observing an epiphenomenon: foliage density. We're looking at whether there’s more or less foliage this year compared to last year as a proxy measure of stress. And we're inviting visitors to correlate these changes with new legislation.  

To legally enfranchise nonhuman species would probably take a constitutional amendment, an idea that we’ve been investigating at Earth Law Center. It’s an ideal but it’s not going to be approved by the electorate anytime soon. On the other hand, it seems eminently feasible to influence people’s political decisions by making them more aware of the ecosystem in which they live such that they can incorporate the interests and worldview of other species at the polls. The MOD installation is intended to encourage people to take nonhuman interests and perspectives into account when they vote.

The overarching goal is to reverse the process of human alienation that began by seeing nature as other. We can reintegrate ourselves into nature by reintegrating nature into human systems.

Fox: From my standpoint, Centuries of the Bristlecone is a project that came about because you wanted to find a way to demonstrate in front of humans in real time the difference between human time and bristlecone time. If I remember correctly, you originally wanted to work with sequoias or redwoods or other species, but The Long Now Foundation said, “We own the largest private grove of bristlecones in the world,” and that’s a 5,000-year potential growth pattern for a plant. 

You were looking for a place where you could take a signal from a bristlecone pine, let’s say the growth of a tree ring annually, as an indicator of the chemical composition of the atmosphere around the bristlecone. And you could put those two facts together and measure a correlation. But all this would be happening on top of an 11,000 foot mountain. How could you get that data and that ongoing signal to the public?

The answer was, find an organization that was nearby in the Nevada Museum of Art. We’re about as close a museum to the bristlecone pines as you can find in this state. And so we began to talk about a device that would translate and make visible that data for people to come in and apprehend on a regular basis or even on a one-time visit, just to get a sense of what the different kinds of time were. It’s an exquisite instrument that’s been designed. It’s taken us years to get here, and it’s a monumental public clock that has both human and bristlecone time being displayed on the face of that clock.

What’s going through your mind as you are coming up with the idea of Centuries of the Bristlecone?

Keats: I’m concerned about the ways in which societies have kept time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, by the mechanization and standardization of time through the use of mechanical, electronic, and atomic clocks. As time became more technical, it became more abstract. Like many technologies, the techno­logy of timekeeping allowed us to disconnect from planetary systems and do what we want to do whenever we want to do it. In modern logistics, there are no temporal feedback loops to indicate the impact of our actions.

In the past (pre-classical Greece, say), and still in some indigenous societies today, time reckoning has very much been about observing phenomena in your midst. Time is embedded in planetary systems and in how other creatures are experiencing these systems together with humans, all living in a state of kinship. 

I want to reintegrate modern society into those planetary systems. I want to do so through law and governance, but also through the mechanism of timekeeping.

Imagine a sapling. If we were to put markers around a tree in the shape of a spiral, and we were to mark them with future dates based on the current average annual growth for that tree, and we were then to stand back and give the tree authority to let us know what time it is, the arboreal year might deviate from the Gregorian calendar. And it would do so in ways that would be meaningful because this would be the ground truth for the tree, influenced by essential factors ranging from precipitation to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. It would be the tree’s experience of time, as legitimate and relevant as any other experience of time. The calendar would be a way to vicariously experience time that is being experienced by others, such that time becomes a relationship. Ultimately, this is how we’ve used time amongst humans, but it needs to be enlarged in terms of who is using and construing time together.

I’d initially been inclined to work with redwood trees because of a talk I gave at the College of the Redwoods years ago. In 02015, I was invited to give a talk at The Long Now Foundation. They’d heard about cameras I’d been making with hundred- and thousand-year-long exposure times. I came in saying that I’d like to propose something new rather than just talk about projects I’d done before. At that initial meeting, I re-encountered Alexander Rose, with whom I’d gone to grade school, and who had subsequently become the Executive Director of Long Now. 

As I told him my ideas about redwood time reckoning, he mentioned the bristlecones. Immediately I knew that those were the trees. He told me about Mount Washington. Immediately I knew that that was the site. It all became obvious. It made perfect sense to do this on Mount Washington, and as you said, to work with a museum. The Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment was perfect because of the proximity.

For all these reasons I took a road trip to Reno with Alexander and Michael McElligott, who at the time was leading Long Now’s Interval lecture series. We made a presentation, and were met with silence. At first we thought it was befuddlement, but it turned out to be the silence of people giving serious thought to our proposal. Before we left, they said yes.

And that’s when you and I started talking. We talked about how the clock needed to be monumental in order to bring people together. It needed to have the monumental scale of a municipal clock. One of the most important decisions was to engage the master clockmaker Phil Abernethy and the antiquarian horologist Brittany Nicole Cox, who have the skills to make this mechanism a reality.

Centuries of the Bristlecone will be a communal gathering point for a new time protocol. Each year or two, we’ll make a trip to Mount Washington, and get the measure of time from the trees by taking a microcore. The clock has a mechanism to measure and record the growth rate shown in the most recent tree ring, and to translate it into the rate at which a pendulum swings. This clock rate will also be available online for people to calibrate their smartphone, their watch, their scheduling software.

But trees are only one dimension of the project. I’ve also been working on a system that correlates the flow of time with the flow of a river. From minute to minute, the clock is unpredictable because the flow of rivers is stochastic, encouraging people to be in the moment. Over the long term, the time indicates changes in the climate through the impact of climate change on glacier melt, rainfall, and groundwater. Like the calendar around the sapling, the calendar on this clock provides an environmental feedback loop.

Several years ago, we projected the first instantiation of this clock onto the front of the Anchorage Museum, indicating time based on the flow of five rivers in Alaska. It was the first visible sign of what time might look like if it were not homogenized like Universal Coordinated Time, of what time might look like if we understood time to be pluralistic. I've also been collaborating on performances on rivers in Atlanta, calibrated by the flow of the Chattahoochee and its tributaries. And I'll be installing two erosion calendars in Atlanta in 02025 and 02026.

Time exists as a conversation between myriad beings and living systems. The conversation becomes accessible to us through a vernacular that we know. A system that is familiar to all humans draws us out into the world while simultaneously bringing the world into our lives.