For those of us lucky enough to travel, there will always be some who can afford to go farther—to destinations less accessible, more remote. The extreme case these days is, of course, space, where you can now book a trip in a gas-guzzling rocket for $1 million or more.
But even the richest of the rich can’t visit the stars. The nearest one is 4.24 light-years from Earth. American experimental philosopher and artist Jonathon Keats decided this was a problem he could fix.
Last month, at Munich’s Festival of the Future, Keats set up his first Stellar Tanning Salon, engineered with the help of German industrial designer Noran Becker. The salon purports to transport visitors dozens of light-years to stars as distant as Vega or Betelgeuse—and to give them the interstellar tan to prove it.
The salon booths were outfitted with programmable LED lights that imitate the spectra of distant stars, bathing visitors in the light of celestial bodies—their melanin stimulated with an intergalactic summer glow.
The salon purports to transport visitors to stars as distant as Vega or Betelgeuse.
To really make the trip, of course, one has to suspend many layers of disbelief. For Keats, this is part of the point. “I'm skeptical that we can distinguish between reality and simulation,” he writes in an email. “Whether anything I offer is real, there remains the opportunity to realize as a society our common origin and fate. All elements in our solar system derive from the same source.”
The 52-year-old Keats, a Nautilus contributor, is a wry poet of inquiry and ideas. By pursuing an amalgam of visual art, meticulously researched science, and performance, he pushes his audiences to ask philosophically knotty questions framed in cheeky, absurdist terms.
For instance, he once famously attempted to genetically engineer God in a petri dish and found that the monotheistic deity’s taxonomy most closely resembles that of cyanobacteria—though he urged further research.
He has also produced pornographic films for plants, projecting images of bees pollinating flowers onto leaves and observing their perceived titillation. Subsequently, he realized that plants are stuck where they are, so he exposed them to two months of film of the Italian sky to give them the experience of travel.
Then, not keen to leave God alone, he made pornography for Him — livestreaming experiments recreating the Big Bang from the Large Hadron Collider, an event he likens to “divine coitus.”
More recently, Keats has challenged the foundations of time itself by resynchronizing the passage of minutes on a municipal clock in Anchorage, Alaska to align with the flow of glacial rivers, rather than to pendulums or cesium clocks. In a recent essay for Nautilus, he wrote that the resulting timepiece was designed to emphasize the creep of climate change on melting ice caps, the rhythms of which put us several days off the standard calendar.
Fortunately, Keats has also copyrighted his mind—which, he stipulates, is a creation that he himself has authored, one thought at a time. His broad public experiments often prompt us to ask not just why—but why not?
Keats says he’s currently planning to open another Stellar Tanning Salon in Milan, Italy, and ultimately, in other galaxies—thereby giving potential extraterrestrials access to the same travel experience we earthlings can partake of—something that he says, “may take more time.”
For Keats, each of us, regardless of our vantage point—be it from a tourist space rocket or stellar tanning booth—is still sitting in a version of Plato’s cave, unaware of what stirs the images flitting before us on the wall. 
Lead photo by Michael Förtsch
