Conceptual artist Jonathan Keats has a new exhibit called The First Copernican Art Manifesto currently showing at San Francisco’s Modernism Gallery through the end of November.

If you’re unfamiliar with Keats, he’s been described by Adam Gopnik as ”a poet of ideas, whose work always rests on a solid basis of scientific research and resolves in a startling, semi-serious image.” This semi-seriousness is key to his work. He has a way of of capturing the imagination with whimsy while making important points through satire.

Some previous projects:

• He has sold real estate in extra dimensions
• Played prayer music to cyanobacteria and fruit flies in an attempt to genetically engineer God
• Opened a photosynthetic restaurant featuring a variety of gourmet sunlight dishes
• Written a story that will gradually reveal itself over the next 1000 years 
• Married anyone — or anything — using quantum entanglement as the tie that binds
• Copyrighted his mind, claiming that it was a sculpture that he’d created, neural network by neural network, through the act of thinking

Find out more about his work here and here.

Art becomes science in this Russian recreation of Marina Abramovic’s The Artist is Present:

Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslav performance artist, has been a fixture in the art world for more than 30 years. In spring 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York featured many of the artist’s older works and a new piece, “The Artist is Present,” where Abramovic sat unmoving in the museum so that spectators could share her gaze for anywhere from a few minutes to a whole day. For Abramovic, the experience was life changing. “The performance becomes the only reality you know … the person in front of you, you perceive his energy, his being.”…

The artist herself spent three hours a day at Garage last week, sitting with museum patrons in a reimagination of ”The Artist is Present.” Russian and American scientists set up an experiment entitled “Measuring the Magic of the Mutual Gaze,” where scientists recorded the brainwaves of Abramovic and her sitting partner in an effort to understand the ability of the brain to unconsciously perceive the emotions of others. The data will be archived so that other scientists can study the ”magic” that happens when two people share eye contact.

Read more…

Artist Tom Sachs is a little obsessed with Space Travel. So much so that he recreated an entire lunar landing with meticulously made props at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills, CA in 2007. Now he’s at it again:

The artist will continue his DIY exploration of the final frontier with “Space Program 2.0: Mars,” a four-week mission that will launch next spring in the 55,000-square-foot drill hall of New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Sachs and his 13-member studio team have used foam core, hot glue, and plywood to create elaborate (yet cheekily rough-hewn) spacecraft, exploratory vehicles, mission control, launch platforms, and a Martian landscape. Visitors to the exhibition, which opens May 18, can watch the intrepid crew from take-off to landing, as they perform mission tasks such as Rover Deployment, Red Beans and Rice Preparation, and Suiting Protocol. The team will also embark on planetary excursions, collect scientific samples, and photograph the surrounding landscape.