For Immediate Release
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BERKELEY ERECTS FIRST TEMPLE FOR WORSHIP OF SCIENCE

New "Atheon" Builds on Latest Cosmology from NASA... Project Conceived by
Artist Jonathon Keats to Debut at Judah L. Magnes Museum With Co-Sponsorship
from the University of California

September 4, 2008 - Four millennia after Abraham fathered Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, and 150,000 years after hominids introduced burial rituals to
the Mediterranean, religion has finally been rendered wholly compatible with
science. Beginning on September 27, 2008, a two-story downtown Berkeley
building dubbed "the Atheon" will provide a spiritual home for rational people in
California, and guidance to acolytes worldwide.

Establishment of an Atheon has been a high priority in the scientific
community for the past several years, rivaling even enthusiasm for the new Large
Hadron Collider. "When you listen to people like Nobel-laureate cosmologist
Steven Weinberg, or Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, you hear a lot of talk
about how god-based religion is out-of-date," says conceptual artist Jonathon
Keats. "The leading minds believe that science can and should provide a
spiritually satisfying replacement. But until recently no one bothered to consider
what form that alternative might take."

Mr. Keats recognized that this was a role for an artist. "Renaissance
masters such as Michelangelo did so much to make Christianity palatable to the
masses," he observes. While Mr. Keats himself can neither paint nor sculpt,
leading institutions including the Berkeley Art Museum and Yerba Buena Center for
the Arts have affirmed his ability to think artistically, featuring his
conceptual work in multiple recent exhibitions. Moreover, he's the only living
artist to take an interest in building a temple to science. "I'm hardly the best
person for the job," he admits, "but if I didn’t take it on, nobody would."

Late last year, Mr. Keats approached the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley
with the idea of temporarily installing a prototype Atheon in their
newly-acquired downtown building, which was slated for major overhaul. "The building
has fourteen-foot-high cathedral-style windows," says chief curator Alla
Efimova, "and frankly nothing was planned there during restoration when Jonathon
came along." With a grant from UC Berkeley's Chancellor's Community
Partnership Fund - alleged to be considerably less than the $10 billion spent on the
Large Hadron Collider - construction of the Atheon began.

This week, Mr. Keats goes public with his plans. "The essence of religion is
stained glass and song," he says. In the case of the Atheon, the stained
glass is patterned to show the cosmic microwave background radiation - capturing
the universe in the first several hundred thousand years of creation - using
NASA's new WMAP satellite data. "The cosmic microwave background is the
sky's natural stained glass, our origin story imprinted on the cosmos," explains
Mr. Keats. "And now it's visible to us for the first time, glowing through
the windows of the Atheon."

The song composed for the Atheon is equally scientific, a canon for three
cosmic voices titled "Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?" The canon
is comprised of sounds pulsating through several hypothetical universes as
well as our own living cosmos, musically arranged by Mr. Keats using audio
files produced by University of Virginia astronomer Mark Whittle. According to
Mr. Keats, "these universes don't provide any answers. If people are to find
spirituality in science, it's likely to be by immersing themselves in
questions."

For the foreseeable future, disciples will have to do so on the sidewalk.
Due to construction work inside the new Magnes Museum building, the Atheon will
be visible only from the exterior, at the corner of Harold Way and Kittredge
Street. The windows will be illuminated nightly until February 1, 2009, and
the canon will be audible by cellphone, as well as on a special website
devoted to the Atheon - www.magnes.org/atheon - scheduled to go live in late
September. The Atheon website will also glow with the cosmic microwave background
radiation, so that people everywhere will be able to turn off their lights
and set up a miniature shrine to science on their home computer.

"Eventually there will be an Atheon in every town," anticipates Mr. Keats,
who's organizing a synod at UC Berkeley in December to consider this
eventuality. "There will be many different architectures and diverse liturgies.
Science will make a fine religion," he predicts. "What remains to be determined is
whether this religion will be good science."


ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jonathon Keats is a conceptual artist, fabulist, and critic residing in San
Francisco. Recently he choreographed the first ballet for honeybees at Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts in conjunction with Bay Area Now 5. He has also
exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum,
unveiled a prototype ouija voting booth for the 2008 election at the Berkeley Art
Museum, attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish in
collaboration with scientists at the University of California, opened the world's first
porn theater for house plants in the town of Chico, and petitioned Berkeley to
pass a fundamental law of logic, a work commissioned by the city's annual
Arts Festival. His projects have been documented by PBS and the BBC World
Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from The San
Francisco Chronicle and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, to Nature and New
Scientist, to Flash Art and ArtUS. Additionally,
Keats serves as the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and as a columnist
for both Artweek and Wired Magazine. He is the author of two novels and a
collection of fables forthcoming from Random House, as well as museum catalogue
essays, monographs, and artist's books. Since graduating summa cum laude
from Amherst College in 1994, he has been a visiting artist at California State
University, Chico, and a guest lecturer at the University of California,
Berkeley, as well as the recipient of Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships. He is
represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco. He can be contacted at
[log in to unmask]


ABOUT THE MAGNES
Berkeley's Judah L. Magnes Museum houses the third largest collection of
Judaica in the United States. Through innovative educational programs,
exhibitions, and publications the Magnes engages with significant issues in
contemporary life, promotes public dialogue and scholarship, and encourages
understanding of Jewish history for present and future generations. The Magnes also
houses the Western Jewish History Center and the Blumenthal Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. The Magnes is accredited by the American Association of Museums.
During renovations, the Magnes will host a series of installations in the
second floor windows of the new building at 2222 Harold Way. For more
information, see www.magnes.org.







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