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Parts of the city will become an art gallery for two weeks as the fifth annual Berkeley Arts Festival’s schedule of performances and exhibitions liven the downtown district, neighborhoods in west Berkeley and even City Hall. Starting Saturday, a citywide spotlight will shine on musicians, writers, performers, tinkerers, filmmakers, designers and a panoply of people who operate artistically.  

The city itself will be a high-concept installation project by San Francisco-based artist Jonathan Keats, who will spend opening day petitioning passersby in an effort to encourage a mock Berkeley City Council to pass a basic law of logic: A=A. The petition sponsors an idea articulated more than 2,000 years ago by Greek thinker Aristotle, whose principle of non-contradiction was a fundamental law of philosophical logic decreeing everything equal to itself. The idea is so simple that at first it may be difficult to grasp. 

“There is not even the possibility of complication,” said Keats, whose proposed legislation would fine a person one-tenth of a penny if they contradict the law. If everything can be equated to itself with the formula A=A, from the Campanile to the mayor to the tritium on campus and the hardened criminals across town, then every person and every thing has the opportunity to be law-abiding. 

For mathematicians and logicians, this principle of non-contradiction is the start of a language for logistical thinking basic truism on which to base more complicated thought equations. But if the City Council does not pass the law, Keats said, it is voting against the most essential truth in the physical universe. 

The absurdity and intellectual background in an attempt to mold a philosophical law into civic legislation is fitting for a college town like Berkeley, and Keats was in fact invited by the Berkeley Arts Festival to perform his conceptual art piece here. “I have a tendency to not know how to do anything,” said Keats, whose previous works include punching a time clock for 24 hours to track the time and duration of his thoughts. The A=A project chiefly consists of reminding people of the omnipresence of a precept for logic. “It’s an installation. It’s everywhere. I want it to be as abstract as possible.” 

The only physical manifestations of the art project will be lapel buttons that Keats is handing out, perhaps a city ordinance, and “maybe something in the newspapers,” but nevertheless “the law is there, we’re moving through it all the time,” Keats said. 

Keats will not be the only one making light of city politics. Members of City Council will come together as the City Council Singers on Saturday to perform Rodgers and Hart’s classic “Blue Moon,” and 7 p.m. each Tuesday George Coates will stage a mock city council at the old City Hall, which will be broadcast live on public access TV on Channel 25.  

Art and politics are the themes of this year’s festival, and a more serious political message will come from hip-hop artist Azeem, scheduled to perform Saturday. Azeem has worked with Michael Franti and Spearhead, and has been featured at Lollapalooza.  

Music will be performed in various corners and niches of Shattuck Avenue between Addison and Durant streets, and in the Wells Fargo Annex building on Center Street. That is also where a roster of Berkeley poets will read and perform 6 to 8 p.m. Aug. 18 in 10-minute intervals. The public library will host readers and film screenings throughout the festival. Even an AC Transit bus will host, en route, a demonstration/lecture, “How To Ride A Bus.” 

Art studios and galleries will open for tours and exhibits in west Berkeley. A gallery crawl Aug. 18 will guide people through Eighth Street Galleries to Alliance Graphics on Parker Street, the Fantasy Records Building on 10th Street and will end at the R&B Museum on San Pablo Avenue.  

Saturday’s Opening Day festivities also include interactive art and activities. A bicycle rodeo will teach stilt walking and unicycle riding, a Music Circus will open itself to anyone who can bring an instrument. For those without instruments, the guys at the Tinkerer’s Workshop will show you how to make a “buffoon” out of straws and paper cones, and then make noise. 

“We don’t like to call it noise,” said Fran Holland, a chief tinkerer at the Workshop. “We’re making powerful sounds. And maybe music.” 

The Tinkerer’s Workshop is builders and inventors at a modest shop in west Berkeley who crowd the shop with recycled bike parts and scavenged junk. At first glance the stuff looks like trash. To a tinkerer, though, it’s all fertile potential. 

Holland works with a lot of young people and organizes after-school projects like his popular bicycle repair workshops. “We creating a safe and stimulating environment to use tools,” he said. “To get kids to a site where they can be creative that is not a restrictive as schools.” 

Whether they make noise or music, during the next two weeks the motley collection of craftspeople and abstract thinkers will showcase their fluid and liberal ideas at the Berkeley Arts Festival. 

WHAT: Mock City Council  

WHO: George Coates and others 

WHEN: 7 p.m. Aug. 13 and 20 

WHERE: Old City Hall, 

2134 Martin Luther King Way 

COST: $10 

INFORMATION: 665-9496