Ecodelic Explorations: AI Art + Arvo Pärt | Kant on Rationality | Evolutionary Adaptations I Love | Greater Than Code | Agency as Art

Hey everyone!  Lots of big moves lately on my end so here's the short of it:

1) I'm hugely expanding my offerings on Patreon, including providing access to HD images of all of my new digital art experiments to the $10 tiers and up.

2) I am, in the parlance of our times, "aping" into NFTs (at Rarible, Hic Et Nunc, Voice, and Mint Songs for starters).  Before you have a kneejerk reaction to this one way or another, it's part of my commitment to guinea pig myself with new media so I can learn their potentials and hopefully help empower other people to take the leap and/or make valid critiques.  I lost a lot of fans when I beta tested Google Glass, but it was SO important to my understanding of evolution and technology, and the role I could play in urgent discourse on these things, and I feel the same way about exploring NFTs.

(Accessibility matters and I don't want you to feel left behind, so please hit me up with questions or feel free to join the discussion we're having about this stuff in the Discord server.)

3) I'm moving the email newsletter from Substack to Revue and returning to biweekly updates, in part because it's unfair to you to keep sending out enormous entries like this one. Hopefully you agree that more bite-sized pieces are easier and more fun than dropping a six-foot sandwich once every 4-8 weeks.  

Thank you for sticking with me through these changes.  Continuing to make art, music, and writing while helping raise two new humans is insanely difficult and it means the world to me that we're on this journey together.

And now for as much new work as I feel okay to share at one time.  More music and paintings soon!

Experimenting with AI Art:  

"Future Fossils" Takes On A New Whole Meaning

It's always been my intention to fold more of what I do under the Future Fossils name, since the podcast is far from the only work that qualifies (as both a trace of present activity left to the future and a kind of presentiment or foreshadowing for later comprehension).

Lately, that's taken the form of two different styles of digital art exploration. This batch here is AI art (using VQGAN+CLIP on a pre-trained model), grown from text-based prompts using the titles of some of my favorite episodes.

This is so incredibly fun. I love collaborating with machines, feeding analog into digital into analog and back again, seeing what can be learned by taking the other's perspective on the self. This series (curated from a much larger pool of failures) are what I consider "hits" where the computer grokked the spirit of the episode, like those "intuitive" plays made by AlphaGo.

If you're interested in owning one of these as a unique (1:1) NFT, I've started minting my favorite generative art experiments on hicetnunc.xyz/futurefossils, which runs on the Tezos blockchain (which is approximately 2,000,000 times more energy efficient than Ethereum — you can read more about sustainability comparisons here and here).

More info on what you're looking at:

168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz - Festival Time, Life-changing Trips, and Community in COVID

49 - Jake Kobrin - Sex, Death, and The Return of The Black Madonna
163 - Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem - Bitcoin and Fungal Economies
69 - Tim Freke - The Evolution of The Imagination



57 - Conner Habib & Mitch Mignano - Occult Biology
171 - Eric Wargo - Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel
100 - The Teafaerie - DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention
176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, & Sam Gandy - Exploring Ecodelia: Myth, Magic, and Mycelium



120 - Ramin Nazer - Cave Paintings for Future People
160 - Stephen Hershey & Kynthia Brunette - His Dark Materials: Narnia, Fillory, and Coming of Age in The Multiverse
109 - Bruce Damer - The Origins and Future of Life
 91 - An Oral History of The End of "Reality"

Writing New & Old on Art, Philosophy, Evolution

Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the 20th Century's musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses.

Here are my nondual reflections on his work (an OLD piece from 2007, recently republished).

I also wrote a short love letter to one of my favorite turtles in Neo.Life, a magazine about synthetic biology founded by Jane Metcalfe of WIRED Magazine fame:

9 Evolutionary Adaptations We Love

And don't think I ever shared this five-minute lecture I gave at The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks last year, very much in the spirit of Terence McKenna:

Deepfakes and The Archaic Revival

Lastly, I recently appeared in The Santa Fe New Mexican by virtue of being the only person at the Santa Fe Institute to have ever used a Bitcoin ATM.

New Podcast Episodes (Both Home & Away Games)

I had a fabulous conversation on Greater Than Code earlier this year about the economically invisible work of true innovation and discovery...it got deep but stayed accessible.  Recommended.

And then more recently I joined my friend Michael Phillip on his show Third Eye Drops to discuss Immanuel Kant's ideas about rational enlightenment, and ask whether we're living in an age of False Enlightenment (spoiler: both of us think the answer is yes).

Lastly, I've had some AMAZING conversations on Future Fossils, recently:

Lastly: Prints & Original Paintings for Giving Season

Here's my print shop and here's my list of available original works.  Happy to offer unique arrangements to interested collectors — I would far rather you have one of these than for me to keep them hoarded in my studio!

"The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."

—Goethe

Autumnal Cornucopia: The Infoboros • New Zelda Song • Carbon-Neutral NFT Future Fossils • Podcast Tour • Back at Meow Wolf Soon!

Thanks for reading! I am trying to get back more, but shorter, more digestible emails...but that means catching up first with a major info-dump. (It's my love language!) Hope your upgrades have been and continue to be mostly pleasant, and that you find something in here that hits the spot. Write back any time...

New Book Cover & Future Fossils NFT Collection

The brilliant Vidur Mishra, gifted undergraduate student of my mentor Richard Doyle, just wrote his first book and it is one hell of a debut. The Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information blends neuroscience, yoga and meditation, and information theory together into a mind-altering ride on the nature of consciousness and what to notice about it.

I feel very lucky to have done the cover for this book. The commission sparked my passion for photomanipulation art, and got me deep in some awesome apps that have become my go-to flowstate protocols when it's too late at night for me to mess with paint or music. And of course, the honor of doing the cover for a book this good...

It's also my first NFT (non-fungible token, a unique digital instance of a work of art, minted on a blockchain) at the carbon-neutral digital art marketplace Voice.com, which I've been following with interest since 2018, well before it launched. I like that they want to make it as easy as can be for artists to produce collections and for people unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies to collect art without having to understand the infrastructure.

And making 1-of-1 "official" versions of each work, in addition to paper and canvas prints, makes me feel like I can recognize my finished products as unique, like paintings, even though the art is easy to mechanically reproduce (although it's worth noting that my NFTs use JPGs orders of magnitude more detailed than what anyone will find online...and that the real utility of NFTs has less to do with owning an art file and more to do with what else having a verifiable on-chain identity opens up — for instance, I can send new works to people who've acquired older ones, or grant them special access to decentralized communities or projects...I'll be writing more about this soon).

Here is more info on the book:

And here is where you'll find the NFT for this piece, and paper or canvas prints.

(I was pleased to learn that Voice promoted my work and this piece in a recent sponsored feature at Gothamist, a New York culture mag with nearly 1M Twitter followers...)

Also on Voice: FINALLY, the series of digital portals I've been diving into, rendered as unique digital collectibles with psychedelic scifi microfictions for each piece (which you can read there). I've always imagined "Future Fossils" as literal objects, time traveling messages from the future, kind of like reverse time capsules. Having, finally, the right place to enact this concept in a series, I'm reveling in the trippy glimpses of "the" future that each one invokes for me, and captioning them in that way...

I'm doing prints for these as well — but nonthelesss believe displaying the 9K-pixel-wide NFT version on a huge solar-powered OLED screen would be impressive.

Find the NFTs and read the microfictions here.

New Song About The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

And then there's this. Sometimes a song just overtakes me and writes itself in minutes. This is one of those. I love it and the people whom I've shown this demo take have ROFLed. Patreon supporters can expect more stuff like this — I'm writing music far, far faster than I can produce definitive recordings, and it seems to me that the best way to honor my undying songbird muse is to just slap these out as rapidly as possible, and loop back when I can. If that sounds fun to you, hop on board and let's do this:

New Podcast Episodes

This show has been quite satisfying for me, lately, as a host. The quality of conversation — the amount of heart and presence, the grace with which we engage in deep stuff with well-balanced levity — has been nourishing.  The latest two are no exceptions:

The Future Fossils Book Club Is Back!

As of this week, all three authors have agreed to be on the show. As always, Patreon supporters at all levels are welcome...and I will set up channels for asynchronous group discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server so we can yarn together about these both before and after the actual live calls. By all means, start reading whenever you like, but I'll be active in the channels in the order I can actually get to these books, starting with Civilized To Death, and will treat these discussions as crowd-sourced notes in preparation for the episodes.

2021 Podcast Tour

I've also been on a lot of other people's amazing podcasts lately, for which I am grateful. A very diverse set of conversations spanning leadership, spiritual inquiry, creative work, sustainability, and much more. I know time is limited but let me know if you would like me to refer you to just one of them in address to a given living question in your heart:

"For episode 33, Layman [Pascal] is joined by Michael Garfield for a stroll along the highlands of weirdness. Ostensibly orbiting Michael's Complexity and Future Fossils podcasts, and his work for the Santa Fe Institute, they riff on the four types of individuals who channel creativity into society; the difficulty of translating novel insights down in the marketplace; ontological pluralism; 'pace layers' in social and artistic transformation; UFOs; Pepe the Frog, cunnilingus, and neo-Shamanic symbology; alternative voting systems and maximizing collective intelligence; dinosaurs; transhumanism, the bicameral mind, and alien modes of consciousness; tantra; retro-causation; the hummingbird at the edge of time; and -- well, frankly, Layman finally found a guest and conversation partner that out-taxed my powers of summary .... Just hop in, strap on, and see for yourself."

"We talk on everything from free will, to the future of civilization; from incentivizing integration over innovation, to staying childlike into adulthood in order to adapt to the disruptive economy we've created. If you like deep thinking, fractal conversation, you will one-hundred-percent-love this episode. Thanks and shouts to Michael for all the insight and good humor he brought to this episode!"

I'm honored to be a grantee of this rad project Idea Market, which seeks to fix the vital problems of mass media reputation market and fact factories. This conversation with founder Mike Elias and co-host James Ellis (also of Hermitix) was extremely fun.

"Discussed: Time-space synesthesia; Corporatization of the natural; 'The incentive structures of society are misaligned with the incentives of individuals'; Scaling laws of life and society; Be open to the unknown or perish; Tokenization of everything and the inability to quantify value; 'Story is the active ingredient in epistemology'; 'The truth owes you jack'; The Century of the Self & why values are more important than incentives; 'I'll probably ruin your entire company'; the need for dissenters...

"Our conversation explored the need for generalists in a highly specialised world and interdisciplinarity, including the following questions: What is the purpose of polymaths? Why is neuroplasticity is the best antidote to uncertainty and complexity? What is the nature of the technological and evolutionary transition we are in right now? Why would we want to live in the future versus the long now?"

"We explore how humans have been evolving with technology, what happens when innovation becomes the problem, and how we can best navigate societal collapse. It's a nourishing buffet of optimistic outlooks and critical evaluations on the very real issues that we're currently facing on the world stage."

They didn't break down this episode with detailed show notes, but I remember this conversation with Taran Rosenthal and Lukas Wolf as a candid trialogue about spiritual practice and psychological inquiry. Very broad, friendly banter that ranged far but stayed close to the heart of things...

Upcoming Concert

Lastly! I'm excited to announce that two years to the day after my last pre-pandemic day, and on the same amazing stage, I'll be back at Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return to open for the awesome electroacoustic harpist Mary Lattimore! If you live nearby (meaning as far as Denver), join me on December 14th and we'll have a grand old time:

“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.”

— Glennon Doyle Melton

An Entire Summer's Worth of Explosive Creativity (Part 1): Indigenous Systems Thinking, Psychedelic Folk, Time Travel, Painted Dinosaurs, Cyborg Cuttlefish...oh, and I had another kid!

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

- J. Krishnamurti

“My point of view is marginal, even in my own community. But there is fertile ground at the margins.”
– Tyson Yunkaporta

Hello, friends! This "biweekly" newsletter last went out on June 19th. 🤦 While routine has never been my strong suit, I'd like to apologize for gathering an entire summer's worth of news into two updates and explain that my silence had good reason — or, two reasons, really:

1) 🐙 This summer I was picked to participate in the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, an amazing international program that brings promising young scientists and inspiring media creators together for a month of intense study and collaboration.  The fruits of this immersion will be falling from my tree for quite some time, starting with this update and proceeding with a steady stream of new art, videos, podcasts, possibly music, maybe even peer-reviewed publications over the next year.

And:

2) 👶 My wife and I just welcomed Ian Taylor Garfield to the family on August 9th!  There are four of us, now, and his arrival catalyzed a period of massive change equal in amplitude to our first child Ada's. I've had to take some time away from the grinds and hustles I've been locked up in for the last fifteen or so years to get perspective and allow the inner transformations to unfold while caring for this growing family amidst a world that seems to make less sense with every passing day.

In spite of working harder than ever while staring into the abyss of even greater responsibility for the well-being of innocents while the whole world waltzes off the plank into total madness, I nonetheless managed to spent a lot of time this summer making art — in part because I need this now, to cope; in part because I somehow only sleep 5-6 hours a night, these days; and in part because I would rather do this than my day job anyway, and must, so here we are.

The hard part has been finding time to share it. Out of respect for your time and attention I will split this update into two parts and send Part Two out next week.  Stay tuned and thank you for sticking with me through all of our mutations!

🎸 NEW SONGS:

HOUSE SHIP ON A HILL

Listen/Buy at Bandcamp

"It takes a certain ability and passion to be vulnerable to release artwork as raw and iridescent as these songs...they came as a complete surprise to me. Hearing ["Autonomous Zone"] filled me with much unexpected emotion. It made my heart hurt, if I’m gonna be honest..."

- Sandra Lam

Three new songs (and four more on the way) — some of the most emotional and mysterious I've ever recorded — about confinement and liberation, hope and anxiety, love and loss, joy and mystery. They haunted me, at length and vividly, and wrote themselves after almost a decade of slow currents, just one song a year. The all-at-once-ness of this inspiration was unusual, but no less than its circumstances...I hope you hear in these a record of the tragic beauty and uncanny brilliance of a time and place.

Life hasn't stopped and 2020 gave me more songs than time to record them, so buying these songs subscribes you to the rest of them as soon as they are ready. Rather than wait until I can get all seven down, I felt like sharing what I have so far...the rest will come, along with more new songs, but I owe it to the muse to get these out now. I hope they help you, too, abide in the complex, diaphonous, and potent energies that animate these times...

For anyone who'd like a deeper exploration, I just shared extensive patrons-only liner notes, with a photo album and a 45-minute exegesis of these songs and their backstory, on Patreon:

🎨 NEW PAINTING:

GMO WATERMELON TOURMALINE PARASAUROLOPHUS

Buy Prints

paint pens on canvas

18" x 24"

My friend and original Future Fossils Podcast cohost Evan "Skytree" Snyder commissioned this piece as an engagement gift to his awesome fiancée. Loosely inspired by Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous' fluorescent designer dinos as well as religious iconography (namely, Tibetan Thangka paintings - you can see it in the eye - and patron saint prayer candles), this piece is loose, stylistic, and playful...not terribly precise as an exercise in perspective or anatomical accuracy, but working on this piece has inspired me to keep going with more of attention to accurate paleoillustration reconstructions that retain this psychedelic art flair. Stay tuned!

🎨 NEW PAINTING-IN-PROGRESS

DIVERSE INTELLIGENCES (WORKING TITLE)

paint pens on masonite panel

48" x 32"

After eleven years of live painting at concerts and festivals that built on a lifetime of doodling in class, working on this large piece while listening to the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute's remote lectures at home in my office felt like landing a successful turn up the helix of personal evolution. This is by no means done, however, and I still have several lectures left to absorb, so it might be a month or so before I have a finished work to share...follow the progress on my Instagram account.  

🎧 NEW FUTURE FOSSILS EPISODES

This show just keeps on getting better — probably because Complexity, the show I host for the Santa Fe Institute, demands so much of me as a scholar and conversationalist and it's honed my work with my own independent podcast. Future Fossils has become the home for conversations I can't have at work — about Indigenous thinking, about time travel and precognition, about visionary art and behavioral design and weird philosophy. But it would be much less without the awesome guests that I've roped in — if you don't recognize these people, let me promise you you're doing yourself favors by absorbing what they have to say.

You can subscribe to Future Fossils anywhere, and join the conversation on Discord and Facebook.

That's it for now. More to share next week. Thank you for reading, reach out any time, and be well!

Life Finds A Way • Hyperstition • Freak Flag Mailbox • Psychedelic Book Club • Post-Covid Festivals • Art & Science • The Future Is Disgusting

"We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is...joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes."

– Joseph Campbell

Consummations and conversations: I've been very busy lately in the Future Fossils Facebook group and Discord server but have nonetheless brought these works — some very long in the incubator — to completion. The relief is real, the resolution deep! Here are my latest psychoactive brain treats to augment your navigation of the weirdness that is 2021:

NEW MUSIC 65 MILLION YEARS IN THE MAKING

Listen at Soundcloud • Purchase at Bandcamp • Save to your Spotify collection

"Life Finds A Way" (and the one-minute instrumental coda "Hyperstition") have been in the works since my dorm room days in 2002 — so not exactly the Cretaceous, but might as well be.

This latest addition to my ongoing album-in-progress The Age of Reunion (which you can scope out and pre-order here) brings acoustic guitar, synthesizer, Chapman Stick, organ, electronic drums, and four-part vocal harmonies together into something appropriately bombastic, groovy, operatic, and apocalyptic to serve as the vehicle for proggy epic pop adventures into the pre-and-post-historic.

Here are a few different ways to engage.  Get out your headphones and hold onto your butts:

🦖 Soundcloud (for time-stamped commenting) 🦖

🦖Bandcamp (for lossless audio downloads) 🦖

🦖 Spotify (for saving to playlists) 🦖

Patreon supporters get some sweet exegesis with an extra half-hour of my Ian Malcolm-esque ranting on the inspiration behind this song: technological evolution, complex systems, accidental magic, reality ruptures, and the end of the world. If you're "like me...a digger," then dig into all that here:

UPCOMING BOOK CLUB CALLS

Speaking of awesome science fiction and general weirdness, we're discussing two amazing books in the Future Fossils Book Club this summer.  I hope you can join us!

I PROMISED YOU I WOULDN'T STOP PAINTING

And now that I have a place I can customize however I like (the pressure!), I started small by upcycling our trashy old mailbox into something that screams "weirdos live here."  Next up: my closet doors...

NEW FUTURE FOSSILS EPISODES

Lastly, while I'm not toiling away at my admittedly-excellent (4.8 stars on 147 Apple Podcast reviews) day job show, Complexity Podcast, I've been knocking out some wonderful conversations and solo casts for Future Fossils. And here they are:

I talk with Mikey Lion, music producer and co-founder of Desert Hearts, and Malena Grosz, creator of The Party Pro Toolkit and director of Stargate Reunion, about the pandemic’s distortions of time and community, flow states and festival time, gatherings in the No New Normal, the impact of stage design and architecture on how community events shape individual experience, the tension between intimacy and scale, DMT and other life-changing experiences, the good parts of tribalism, psychedelic integration, and the future of festival economics…

Watch Here

On 23 May 2021 as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds: 

Michaela Emch is a communication and marketing specialist, translator, cultural mediator, biomimicry practitioner, safari guide, keen naturalist and biology enthusiast. Andréa Naccache is a psychoanalyst and a doctoral student in philosophy of law at the University of São Paulo, with an MBA in finance. Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who makes installations, drawings, and performances. Timothy Clancy work ranges from sophisticated simulations of violence & instability to systems thinking for business.

We discussed the relationship between the arts and sciences, conflicts of interest between systems and individual people, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

The first in a new biweekly, patrons-only sidestream for author-read essays, commentary on current events, mailbag replies, and experimental format episodes. First up is a reading of and commentary on my Part Six of my book-forever-in-progress, How To Live in The Future: "The Future Is Disgusting."

Here's a teaser:

The future that I want, the only future I believe worth living in, is full of love — and love is all about relaxing boundaries. Erupting into our Italian gardens, smashing manicured taxonomies, and popping our extropian illusions of a better life beyond constraints, love is the greatest trickster that reveals distinctions in imagined unity and unifies apparent opposites, to hell with definitions; it is time for you to learn.

And that ensures the future will be positively gross, because as every set of paired antitheses resolves within the immanent-transcendent whole appearing as the herald of another era, nemeses are written into myth together; warring faiths combine their efforts to create economies; and everything you loathe today is indispensably a part of who you are, in truth, and who you could become if you survive and live receptive to the gnarly lessons of reflection offered up to you by love.

Someday all you hate will lose its charge within a greater truth — which, in a way, is even worse than knowing it will just persist. No: it becomes a part of you, and therefore worthy of your love; you learn to dig the things you feared; your brain adapts to shifting norms; we really are remarkable in our plasticity, and you’ll regard you-reading-now as hopelessly naïve, and small, and understandable, for all your ignorances are enshrined and glow within as relics of the origin of that more terrible and beautiful, awake and all-embracing thing you are.

MISCELLANY

Available NFTs at Rarible

Available NFTs at Foundation

My ever-deepening feed of wondrous musical discoveries