🎉 Happy New Year! Lasers + Dinosaurs + Singularities

Now that we're TRULY over the rainbow...

Happy New Year, everyone!  My birthday comes two weeks after Christmas, so this time of year is always hopeful and uplifting in spite of — or rather in juicy harmony with — the vibe of wintry contemplation, holiday burnout, and bare-treed, sky-wide reflections on time, life, and everything.  02020 gave us all so much to think about and learn from, recover from and build on.

Like I imagine you are, I'm looking forward into 02021 a little battle-worn but clarified and eager to explore some new horizons. This year is going to be different — I'm not quite sure yet how, but I am always grateful for this moment when our culture calls us to reach into mystery and possibility each year. And in the meantime, I have a trove of unpublished work I'm eager to share in the months to come.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who bought a painting in my moving sale and helped us fix up and furnish our new family home!  Still some time left to contribute and score art at wholesale prices — I have just a handful of originals remaining, and I'm at work on a raft of new small studio pieces, but I'm also open for commissions — email me with inquiries.

And now here are a few new things. More soon. See you in the Future Fossils Discord Server...!

Love,

Michael

"Urvogel" (First Bird) Archaeopteryx Wood Ornaments

I made these on my Glowforge as Christmas gifts — short philosophical musing below on what it feels like to try and translate the analog uniqueness of painting to this digital medium.

They're not currently available for sale but I'm happy to talk about commissioned laser-enabled designs, if you're interested! Scheming about additional perks for Patreon supporters and happy to take suggestions for the best possible applications of my artwork to laser cut and engraved merchandise.

Sometimes I think there must be something like ASMR for eyeballs, looking at very tiny things or seeing things in neat rows, that satisfies the brain's prediction reward circuitry and is partly responsible for the mechanized aesthetic that dominates modernity. It feels like an ironic hijack of biophilia and our biologically innate love of forms like tree branches and river deltas: the fractal order of our evolved life-world swapped out for a lower-dimensional shadow of the ancient mystery of reproduction.
Walter Benjamin explored this, and asked about what sacredness still lives in mechanically-duplicated art forms, in his most famous essay; WJT Mitchell updated that essay for our biocybernetic century. And as technology evolves according to the same rules as everything else, it looks and acts more and more like the kind of living systems we're used to: dynamic, mutable, branching, turbulent, unpredictable. 

Something of that was captured in these laser cut Archaeopteryx ornaments I made to break in my Glowforge this year — like (but admittedly much simpler than) printing Leeloo in The Fifth Element, seeing row after row of echoes of one of the world's most unique and precious fossils feels to me like a portal into a future in which human and nonhuman life alike becomes both more ephemeral and priceless, and we develop a more nuanced understanding of individuality and selfhood.

(When you can be copied like any other computer file, what makes you unique? Your context. Your history. What cannot be copied. See also Westworld, which I discussed with Michael Phillip way back in Episode 14 of Future Fossils Podcast, and Episode 65 with John David Ebert and I unpacking the mythical and spiritual themes of Blade Runner 2049.)
Anyway...

Mid-Singularity Trialogues with Ramin Nazer & The Teafaerie

Listen anywhere you go for podcasts.

Reporting from mid-singularity, friends and returning guests Ramin Nazer, The Teafaerie, and I run for several full-court passes on augmented reality, telepresence, simulation theory, the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi, how to enjoy the rapids of change, and much more.

If that doesn't satisfy your thirst for weird sh*t, go listen to more about virtuality, artificial consciousness, and neuroscience, in my appearance on the Voices in the Dark podcast.

Book Club Recordings Now Free For Everyone

ICYMI I've made all of the Future Fossils Podcast Book Club recordings entirely free, moving them from behind the Patreon paywall so everyone can appreciate the deep and illuminating discussions we've had about some of the coolest books I've ever read. Enjoy!

Follow My Chill Spotify Playlist (Recommendations)

This is where I share all of the cool new music I discover. Chillout, electro-folk, acoustic instrumentals, avant-pop, film scores, and more — it is as everywhere as I am, but I hope that you agree it all coheres.

If you have tracks you'd like to add, please share them in the Future Fossils Discord Server!

Follow me elsewhere:

Spotify | YouTube | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Soundcloud | Bandcamp

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New Prog Folk Single "Indecision" • Live Notes from #IPFest 2019 • Upcoming Shows • New Archaeopteryx Painting • Secret Future Fossils Episodes

Happy summer, everybody!  We're well into the hot months, and insofar as life is the spontaneous formation of order for the dissipation of excess energy, I've been an actively engaged in the metabolism of our cosmos – making more art and music, I fear, than you can actually absorb.

So be it.  May this love's labor find you on a good day, when you're looking for some fresh and interesting stuff.  We seem to have less time for taking in new art and music than we did when this blog started in 2009, but I'm convinced the work just keeps on getting better, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.

In this newsletter:  new (and very different) music; new live art (both analog and digital); two Future Fossils Podcast episodes (on time loops and on driverless hotel rooms); and a secret stash of never-to-be-aired recordings.

Enjoy, and write back any time,

Michael

New Song: "Indecision"

"Mars Volta meets what Dave Matthews might hear after trying DMT? I love it."

- James Boswell (Ming Dynazty)

"Fantastic. Like a The Books track with extremely creative vocals."
- Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio, Earthcry)

"It's like TOOL and Herbie Hancock had a baby."
- Matthew Foglia

"A great sonic achievement! Reminds me a lot of Peter Gabriel's best stuff."
- Norman "Dr. Blue" Katz

Free Download

In the moment before acting lies a void

where every future gleams, reflecting every other
every moment a uniquely blooming world.
In the space between two thoughts
where every other instant grows
expanding now into infinity
and every possibility unfurls...
How do you choose your next life?

I'm finally back in the saddle with the project I began way back in 1998: to join the Great Parade of visionary and alchemical songwriters, marrying acoustic and electric elements for tunes that gesture toward the singularity we live within in every moment.

Whatever else I do, the songs I've offered to this world in a handful of rare studio efforts (2006, 2008, 2014) are the sharpest and most polished work, the closest to my soul and sense of what is truly meaningful.

"Indecision," paintstakingly produced by my partner in crime Mitch Mignano, is the fruit of an epic co-creative pregnancy.  Read all about it on my Patreon account...

(Special thanks to Randal Roberts for the perfect cover art!)

Upcoming Concerts:

27 July – Santa Fe – Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant

28 July – Albuquerque – House Concert in Albuquerque with Seth Hoffman

8 August – Santa Fe – Tumbleroot Distillery with Josh Glenn Experiment

New Painting: "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic"

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Here is my latest painting, "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic" - a tribute to the amazing Archaeopteryx, my spirit animal and one of history's most legendary fossil creatures – painted live at Meow Wolf for my first Santa Fe gallery show at Eye on The Mountain.  (Acrylic and oil pens on 20"x20" panel.)

Read the whole story at michaelgarfieldart.com.

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival 2019

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Last year, Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Festival changed my life: this confluence of luminaries celebrating complex systems thinking and space exploration inspired me to move to Santa Fe. (Here's the free live album of my concert from last year's event.)

This year, on staff at SFI, I got to sit on stage and take live notes on a huge LED wall for some epic panels on synthetic biology, science fiction, and visionary architecture:

Check out this Google Photos album for all of the notes I took this year (both final images and time-lapse videos), plus the painting that I made on stage alongside Santa Fe's Tone Ranger:

Notes from #IPFest 2019

I highly recommend you watch the full-length videos of each discussion, with my notes unfolding in real-time behind the panelists, because those conversations rocked.  But if you aren't that curious, here's a fun 360º time-lapse of the UFO piece you can groove to in less than one minute:

Watch on YouTube

New Podcast Episodes

The latest episodes of Future Fossils cover both ends of the spectrum this show seems to span:  on one hand, Eric Wargo's brilliant take on how the future co-determines history; and on the other, Nathan Water's genius mashup of self-driving cars, technomadism, and the blockchain.

And lastly, I have finally made good on promises to drop a cornucopia of secret episodes on Patreon supporters with more than eight hours of never-to-be-aired recordings – including a totally bizarre panel discussion on the nature of time from my 2017 Australia tour, chats with a tantric instructor and a standup comic, and three other would-be episodes too weird to live, too rare to die:

Subscribe on Patreon for Secret Fossils

"If the truth is so important, then why am I in trouble for trying to find it?"
- Shane Mauss