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!
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."
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
“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.”
— Glennon Doyle Melton
