Jonathon Keats Creates 10,000-Year Film Project at LACMA Using Ancient Techniques

Artist Jonathon Keats has installed a conceptual artwork titled Deep Time Cinematography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The site-specific piece employs a handcrafted pinhole camera positioned on the BCAM building's third-floor escalator landing. Over the next ten millennia, the apparatus will capture ten sequential images of the Hollywood Hills landscape, with museum staff replacing a copper plate every thousand years. Keats, a 2015 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant recipient, adapts Renaissance painting methods using rose madder pigment on prepared plates. The project aims to provoke consideration of long-term environmental changes and intergenerational responsibility through its extreme temporal scale.