The Erosion of Time

By Jonathon Keats

The Erosion of Time, a land art work by Jonathon Keats, will feature a series of calendar stones, each with an incremental year carved into it.  These dates will erode over time by the flowing water that will pass over each stone during future rain events.  The work will provide an inter-generational indicator of environmental change and help to promote sensitivity to the rivers and watersheds within the metro Atlanta region.

Collaborating with the South Fork Conservancy, one “calendar” will be installed in Zonolite Park (2024) along the south fork of Peachtree Creek, a tributary of the Chattahoochee River.  In a collaboration with Atlanta Habitat for Humanity, a second erosion calendar will be installed in 2025 in the central community open space at Browns Mill Village, a Habitat development in South Atlanta.  Within this space lies headwaters of the South River.

The installation in Browns Mill Village will mark the completion of the neighborhood and Atlanta Habitat’s 40th anniversary.  Quarterly performances by local by dance, music, and spoken work artists will activate the installation quarterly, reconnecting visitors to water, time, and each other.

Photo:  mock-up of installation in Browns Mill Village

FLOW
The Erosion of Time is part of FLOW, a multi-year series designed to explore Atlanta’s history with water, how it has shaped our city and the potential it holds for our future. FLOW engages issues of conservation, equity, and urban design through installations and performances around the city.

About the Artist

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 whose conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities.

Keats has exhibited art and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO.

He is the award-winning 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.

Keats has been an artist-in-residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, a Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment, and a visiting artist at schools ranging from Hampshire College to Chico State University. He has been awarded residencies by Yaddo, MacDowell, Ucross, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacNamara Foundation, the Serenbe Institute, the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and the Ufficio Speciale per la Ricostruzione dei Comuni del Cratere.

He is currently a visiting scholar at San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, a research fellow at the Highland Institute, a visiting instructor at the University of Zürich, a consulting philosopher at both Earth Law Center and the Museum of Tomorrow, a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a Flux Exchange Artist at Flux Projects, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, Autodesk, and UC San Francisco’s Memory & Aging Center. He co-directs the Center for Climate-Adapted Heritage Cuisine, a collaboration of the University of Arizona and the University of Maryland in partnership with the UNESCO Creative Cities of Gastronomy.

A monograph about his transdisciplinary work, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag, and an audiobook about one of his projects, The Curious Case of the Pheromonophone, was recently released by Audible.