world with me, where thought experiments
could potentially encompass everything and
engage everyone in ways that were genuinely
experimental.
Today all of my art projects are really thought
experiments, designed to be experienced. My
art is the creation of hypotheticals: Recently
I’ve opened a human cloning agency using
epigenetics, started a photosynthetic restaurant
for plants, and given cyanobacteria access to
the Hubble Space Telescope. These projects
are completely open-ended. There’s nothing
I’m trying to prove or demonstrate. Ideally
each experiment leads to further experiments
undertaken by others. It’s a positive feedback
loop. The thought experiment becomes a
methodology for bootstrapping curiosity.
APT: How do you come up with your ideas?
Can you describe any of the moments in which
you got an idea that became a work of art?
JK: I don’t think I could have survived in
academia even if I’d wanted to. Fundamentally
I’m a dilettante, and that’s the means by which
I come upon new ideas. Since everything
interests me, I read very widely—from
antiquarian books to the latest magazines,
newspapers, and blogs. I read about science
and technology of course, but also politics,
economics, history, religion, mythology. I’m
especially obsessed with obscure details.
Recently I was researching the invention of the
megaphone, alloys from which world coinage is
made, the nervous system of sea urchins. Mostly
I’m not searching for anything in particular,
but I’m always attuned to serendipity. A new
project evolves out of chance relationships
between topics I’m studying. I’m attentive to
how disparate bodies of knowledge or belief
resonate in unintended ways.
For example, my photosynthetic restaurant
emerged out of research on the development
of French cuisine and my curiosity about
greenhouse design. There was no connection
between these realms, at least not until I
made one, tentatively, by asking myself an odd
question: What if greenhouses weren’t designed
to optimize plant growth, but rather to provide
plants with the enjoyment of gourmet sunlight?
That led to some focused research on the
physiology of plants—in terms of how different
wavelengths affect photosynthesis—and also
an attempt to distill some abstract rules of
SciArt in America February 2014
gourmet cooking. Translating those rules into
a culinary language appropriate for plants,
I opened a restaurant in the gardens of the
Crocker Art Museum.
Technically, the restaurant was very simple:
Natural sunlight passed through a succession
of colored filters positioned over a tangle of
rose bushes. The coloration of sunlight changed
over the course of the day as the sun traversed
the sky. Color combinations were selected to
provide experiences equivalent to those induced
in humans by a gourmet meal. For plants
elsewhere around the world, I published a
recipe book, and also broadcast a TV dinner for
plants on a public access station in Manhattan.
(Plants in front of the television were saturated
in a succession of different colors.) In all of
these endeavors, the thought experiment went
both ways, exploring how plants experience
the world, while also examining one of the
behaviors that most makes us human.
A lot of my projects involve the sciences
in one way or another not because I think
the sciences are inherently more interesting
than other topics, but rather because science
pervades everything in the world today. Along
with religion (and often in conflict with it),
science is our operating system, our underlying
way of thinking. That makes it nearly invisible,
all too infrequently examined. In part my
projects are efforts to expose how we think
about ourselves and the universe.
APT: Your art puts forward many ideas, such
as “art should be bland” or “there should be a
law that A=A.” Is there some distance between
the ideas presented in your art and your own
ideas? Do you adopt fictional personae with
some of these artworks? Why or why not?
JK: The sort of work I do generally doesn’t
have a big budget. As a result, I have to hire the
cheapest available labor, and inevitably the least
expensive laborer is me. So I have a sort of dual
identity: There’s the experimental philosopher
who’s interested in exploring ideas by setting
up thought experiments; And there’s the person
within the thought experiment tasked with
creating and maintaining the experimental
conditions as fully as possible.
Since every thought experiment is different,
each job is unlike any I’ve had before. When I
decided to pass a perfect law—legislating the
logical proposition that every entity is identical
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