[3] Keats made his debut in 2000 at Refusalon in San Francisco, where he sat in a chair and thought for 24 hours, with a female model posing nude in the gallery.

[6] However it did become a topic of debate in the 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial race, garnering cryptic words of support from the Mitt Romney campaign[7] and sparked a copycat petition drive in Santa Cruz, California.

[8] In the same year, amidst tightening post-9/11 security, Keats initiated a series of anonymous self-portraits of visitors to the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, created by fingerprinting them as they entered the building.

The reason, he told the BBC World Service when interviewed about the project, was to attain temporary immortality, on the grounds that the Copyright Act would give him intellectual property rights on his mind for a period of seventy years after his death.

In order to fund the posthumous marketing of intellectual property rights to his mind, he sold futures contracts on his brain in an IPO at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

[20] In interviews with journalists, he indicated that his initial results showed a close taxonomic relationship to cyanobacteria, but cautioned that his pilot study, which relied on continuous in vitro evolution, was not definitive, urging interested parties to pursue their own research, and to submit findings to the International Association for Divine Taxonomy, on which he served as executive director.

[23][24] Around the same time, he became interested in extraterrestrial abstract art, and began producing canvas paintings based on signals detected by the Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope in Puerto Rico.

[28][29][30] In 2006 Keats undertook several new projects, including two collaborations with other species: In rural Georgia, he gave fifty Leyland cypress trees the opportunity to make art by providing them with easels.

[35] And at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, he applied string theory to real estate development, enlisting the legal framework of air rights to buy and sell properties in the extra dimensions of space theorized by physics.

[47] In Chico, California, Keats opened the world's first porn theater for house plants, projecting video footage of pollination onto the foliage of ninety rhododendrons.

[61] At Modernism Gallery in San Francisco the following month, Keats developed new miracles, including novel solar systems and supernova pyrotechnic displays, which he made available for licensing by gods.

[67][68][69] He also erected the first temple devoted to the worship of science, dubbed "the Atheon",[70] in downtown Berkeley, CA,[71] a public art project commissioned by the Judah L. Magnes Museum[72] and funded with a grant from the University of California.

[74][75][76][77][78] After a Wired Science interview with the artist was featured on the Yahoo homepage on September 29,[79] controversy erupted in both the scientific[80] and religious[81][82][83] communities, and interest in the Atheon gained traction worldwide.

[94] Enlisting the many worlds interpretation of physicist Hugh Everett,[95] his process made use of readily-available equipment including uranium-doped glass and scintillating crystal, all acquired on eBay.

kit that purported to let anyone create new universes with a mason jar, a drinking straw, and a piece of chewing gum,[98] a gadget much commented upon in the media[99][100][101][102][103] and widely popular in the blogosphere.

[114] He also composed a song to be performed by Mandeville Creek on the MSU campus, orchestrated by rearranging rocks melodically, using the musical structure of the medieval rondeau.

[148] Headquartered at California State University, Chico,[149] the organization claimed to be taking on the exploratory role abandoned by NASA, and announced simultaneous missions to the Moon and Mars.

[152][153] LASA also entered the space tourism business,[154] offering humans the opportunity to explore the Moon and Mars by buying and drinking bottled lunar and martian mineral waters at an "exotourism bureau" in San Francisco.

"[196][197][198] In a manifesto published by Zyzzyva, he declared that "while the Copernican Revolution has enlightened scientists for centuries, art remains Ptolemaic," favoring masterpieces rather than average phenomena.

[199] To attain Copernican "mediocrity" in the arts, he produced paintings that were the average color of the universe, a light shade of beige, which he exhibited at Modernism Gallery in San Francisco, California.

[207][208][209] Situated in the San Francisco Arts Commission gallery, his academy provided colonies of cyanobacteria with access to imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope, which he said would allow the photosynthetic microbes to do astrophysical research.

[210][211][212][213][214] In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Keats explained that he was motivated by the unresolved scientific quest for a theory of everything, the failings of which he attributed to the complexity of the human brain relative to the simplicity of the universe.

[216][217] According to The Economist, his enterprise exploited "electrochemical arbitrage", generating energy by taking advantage of differences in the metallic content of Chinese and American coinages.