Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited in museums worldwide and is the 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 – as well as an award-winning story collection published by Random House. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Mexico City’s UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies, a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Biofrontiers Institute and San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a lecturer at the University of Zurich’s School for Transdisciplinary Studies, a senior fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, an artist research fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, Biosphere 2, and the Collaborative Research Centre for Molecular Evolution. He co-directs the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Architectural Heritage at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics. He is the author of a monthly online arts column for Forbes. A monograph about his artwork, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag. His newest book, A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance, is forthcoming from the Berggruen Press in 2026.
Money shapes how we think, behave, and relate to one another – often in ways we barely notice. But what if money itself could be redesigned? Could money be shaped in ways that overcome cognitive biases such as loss aversion? Could the ergonomics of cash be adjusted to encourage g…
Money is one of the most powerful systems of collective belief – yet it can take radically different forms beyond coins, paper, and crypto. On the Western Pacific island of Yap, for instance, giant stone coins were used for centuries. Too heavy to move, many of them never physica…