Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Australia
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts

26 February 2019

Waterloo Festival Team Mural | Listening To Plants | Psychonautics | New Coloring Pages & Timelapse | Future Fossils Book Club

Okay, it's been too long. So much is happening and it's all just getting faster all the time (unless you're software). My partner and I are about to have a kid. We moved to Santa Fe. I work for these insane(ly) brilliant people now. I'm almost out of paintings, and I can't make them fast enough with all the other things I'm doing at the moment...

That said, here's tons of stuff, as usual. I'm always here if you write back, and hope the upgrades' going smoothly for you – meaning easily, which probably means a river-bending, highly corrugated kind of way, like brains (they're better at computing when they're dense, so take it as a compliment).

I love you all and feel a thing about this taking so damn long to make it to you. Anyway!


The Waterloo Music Festival Collaboration Mural


A painting made in the craziest environment, at the most complete and awesome festival installation I have ever proposed, with a team of artists I can't believe I mustered into such intense collaboration.

A giant piece – nine-plus feet wide and four high – that spilled over into months of meetings and late sessions, seven of us focusing on areas and balanced coverage, and arguing a lot, and learning...all the while the looming focus of my living room, for months, and detailed in this photojournal.

This piece is in a private collection in Austin, now, but we finally can make some prints for everyone who cheered us on through this foolishly ambitious project.  Thank you!

Artist Instagram Accounts:


New Music: Listening to Plants at Starseed Gardens



Recorded in maybe the most magical place I have ever been, late on a sweaty summer night, surrounded by an acres-wide nursery of medicine plants growing from the black earth of a dead volcano, a short walk from a giant ancient fig tree and a slightly longer walk from the easternmost point of the continent and white sharks. 

Starseed Gardens was a standout moment in my tour Down Under and a precious, moving place. This is the music that emerged in ritual there, a song to the intelligence around us. 

Performed on acoustic guitar and hardware electronic effects. 

In memory of Dan Schreiber. 


I'm In This Movie (Speaking & Music)


If you don't already know, Shane Mauss is one of the smartest comedians on the beat right now; he hosts Here We Are, a science interview podcast that's really cool; and he's been candid (on Duncan Trussell's show, as well as on Future Fossils Episode 58) about how his psychonautic adventures helped push him over the brink into a delusional mania and temporary institutionalization (although, I think he needs to emphasize that he also quit alcoholism stone cold at that time, which may have had some tiny thing to do with it). 

This is his documentary of those adventures, and I'm in it cross-cut with the legendary James Fadiman, talking about Richard Doyle's writing on human-plant co-evolution and its role in the emergence of language...I also have a music credit, and a handful of great queues throughout, along with awesome animations by Ramin Nazer and the most paradoxically sober reflection you could expect from a documentary about psychedelic self-experimentation.

But for many other reasons that will make sense in retrospect, I highly encourage you to preorder it. One of those reasons is to help it up the charts. (I don't get a cut; I just want this conversation on the front page.)


This New Time-Lapse Video with John David Ebert (Future Fossils #65)


These New Future Fossils Coloring Book Pages



Five new coloring book pages for a total of 25 so far. I add new ones as often as I can!


These New Podcast Episodes & Special Features

 
   
 

In addition to the six latest episodes of Future Fossils Podcast, which span the gamut from the most confessional and bizarre episodes I've ever released to the most professional and discrete, here are two special offerings – one public and one for Patreon supporters only. 

We've started Future Fossils Book Club with an awesome conversation on the even-more-awesome Blindsight by Peter Watts, a truly important and unsettling work. And I also compiled dozens of my favorite excerpts from the show's 2018 run to make The Sediment of Sentiments, a kind of meta-fossil for everybody to enjoy:


  


These Two Silly Interviews:


Voyage Dallas • Voyage Houston

Origin stories, if you're bored. Weirdly got asked to do the same interview by the same magazine in two different cities where I don't live, but hey. It was an opportunity to play. :)


This Isn't New, But Still:

Patreon supporters get 10-20% off all my prints and merchandise at michaelgarfieldart.com:

28 July 2017

Dispatch from A One-Man Singularity / Entirely Too Many Pretty Things

Hey friends!  Quick Note:  

I know most of you signed on for art, but chances are that means you're smart and curious and have one eye and ear turned toward the transcendental – and lately, it feels like my art is mostly here to get you to stay still for long enough so we can have a deeper exchange.

I know that we're all overwhelmed and it's impossible for us to catch up on it all, but hopefully the work I do beyond the easel can inspire you in the moments when you're driving, working, listening to podcasts, looking for new things to read...the new podcasts and live solo acoustic sets I published this month are better than anything I was making a few years ago and I hope that they creep into whatever part of your life is lame right now and improve it for you suddenly and radically. 

Last thing:  I'm writing science fiction now.  Here is a preview of the piece I'm working on: a dispatch from the world in which AI has made it hard to tell what's real, and what's a forgery.  I made this sample audio recording in part as the first of a series of micro-casts as this story writes itself, and in part as an audition to be an Audible audiobook reader.  (Maybe I'm trolling Audible by sending them sci-fi about the day in which we can't be sure of anything we hear...?)

And now, the new stuff!  Consider supporting me on Patreon if you appreciate these emails – I'll be putting out more special work exclusive to subscribers, soon.  I love you and I'm grateful for you always!

blessings
Michael

Music Video for "VALIS" with Dance Artist Donna Zakura

Here's my first music video since dinosaurs, featuring amazing dancer Donna Zakura and her equally amazing videographer Anthony Dempsey.  They weren't the only great discoveries I made while in Australia last (Southern) summer – here for you are new recordings of my talks & singer-songwriter performances at Mycelium Studios in Melbourne and Backyard Network in Sydney.  The storyteller/fireside chat format was a delightful change of pace and drew new insights and stories out of me – plus, you get to hear some new songs.  :)

"My Dark Companion"
48"x30" – acrylic & oil paint pen on canvas

Labradorite peacock demiurge unfolding limbs in interstellar darkness, iridescent living music stirring from its slumber, wave on wave of scintillating eyeless self-awareness, blossoming serrated rainbows spooling out from glistening wet froth of possibility, potential into actual, a lucid dream that eats your waking life...

Original piece painted with oil and acrylic paint on canvas – begun at Llano Earth Arts Fest (Llano, Texas) on 11 March 2017, continued at Euphoria Fest (Austin, Texas) in April 2017, and completed over countless late nights in the studio through 18 July 2017.

My most successful instagram post ever and, perhaps for the same reason, maybe the most time-intensive painting I have ever made.  Dedicated to Ali McGhee.


"Beija Flor III"
18"x24" – oil and acrylic paint on canvas

Beija Flor (Portuguese for "flower kisser") visits some San Pedro cacti on a flight through the imagination. The hummingbird brings joy and love...but it's also a fiercely territorial relative of the Velociraptor!  Never Forget.


Australia Tour Live Recordings Now Online!
 

Two of the better shows I've ever played, now yours for free or what you can afford to offer.  Each of these recordings captured a full hour-long talk and a full singer-songwriter performance in an intimate live setting with attentive audiences, and you definitely hear and feel the difference.  I am glad I finally had the time to mix these down and share them with you!  (If you're reading this on my blog instead of email, here are some preview tracks:)



New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes
  

Three episodes of Future Fossils with three awesome people, covering the bases of art, science, and spirituality with stories about the early days of the World Wide Web, the first life on Earth, and the future of art as a tool of political provocation.

More Writing at Steemit

Exhumed from the ruins of my old writing job and made available again for the first time in years:


Upcoming Events

28 July – Austin, TX – Cherrywood Studios
Decentralized Art Shows – Cryptocurrency Art Opening

30 July – San Marcos, TX – KIVA Bar & Lounge
Cyberguitar set with Hello Crescendo, Bull Moose & Bonnie, laissez faire cassette

1 August – Austin, TX – Sidewinder Bar
Cyberguitar set with HoneySon, AlexAlco, Mode Dodeca

17 - 23 August – Big Summit Prairie, OR – Oregon Eclipse Festival
Speaking & Playing live music for yoga (with Emelie Rose)

27 August - 4 September – Black Rock City, NV – Burning Man Festival
Speaking & Playing Cyberguitar at Palenque Norte & Burners Without Borders
Details TBA

7 September – Austin, TX – Crux Climbing Gym
Cyberguitar (Floating Islands) set with Funkotron, The Mismatch, Gasoline Boots, Skymomma, DJ Lefty

22 - 24 September – Utopia, TX – UtopiaFest
The festival's first-ever sunrise set!


25 January 2017

I'm In Australia! // New Song, 360 Video, Painting, Stickers // Westworld Problems & Body Hacking on Future Fossils


“Do not look for the purpose. Think of the way we came and be a little proud. Think of this hand – the utter pain of its first venture on the pebbly shore.”
– Loren Eiseley, poet-archeologist

Greetings, friends!  Since we're now at cruising altitude on the adventure that is 2017...

I'm on tour in Australia for the next month.  Here's my tour schedule (more updates to come) – if you know people out this way please introduce us!  Time is precious and I'm eager to contribute all I can to the enduring reputation of Americans as generous, inspired, helpful, interesting, lovely people, regardless of the tensions of our world at large.

Thanks hugely to my supporters on Patreon for helping me fund this trip.  You've helped me immensely with your many modest contributions – every bit has helped and I can't wait to pay it back

Here are my latest works, for you – the fruits of my love's labor – enjoy, and stay in touch!

MUSIC
"Indecision" 
Unplugged in Odemira, Portugal
(freestyle instrumental intro) 

Filmed at the ruins of a gorgeous old windmill in rural Portugal while I was visiting form Boom Festival in August 2016.  My song off the forthcoming album about how every moment of our lives is like a little near-death experience. Every choice we make, a little death...a gorgeous new horizon.

Be sure to watch this video on Chrome or the YouTube app so you can move around it and explore the whole surround...   Full lyrics and more info here.

In the moment before acting lies a void
where every future gleams, reflecting every other

each potential a uniquely blooming world.

In the space between two thoughts

where every instant pours, expanding now into infinity
and every possibility unfurls...
How do you choose your next life?

ARTWORK
"The Land After Time (Littlefoot Considers Singularities)"
48"x24" // paint pens on canvas

The Land Before Time is one of my favorite movies from childhood; the title implies an antipode, a post-historical reciprocation.  In my vision of this moment, my most time-intensive painting to date and the latest in my series, The Psychedelic Age of Dinosaurs (Triceratops, Tyrannosaurus, and more soon), Littlefoot grows up and lives through the Singularity to inhabit a transfigured landscape populated by mysterious and metamorphic life-forms...

Painted at Unify Festival 2016 (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Green Beer Festival 2016 (Boulder, Colorado), and months of work in my Austin, Texas studio.  Finished on New Year's Eve 2016.


New 4"x3" Stickers: "Beija Flor" & "End of the World Party"
High Quality Weather Resistant Vinyl, 
Backsplit & UV Coated


PODCAST


The show that explores our distant past, deep future, and the countless other dimension-perspectives on time and the human condition that our mainstream narratives ignore.  Subscribe to us on iTunes (for iOS) or Stitcher (for Android).  Here are our latest episodes:

0014:  "Westworld Problems" with Michael Phillip

One of my favorite TV shows ever, Westworld, deserves a conversation smart enough to match its writing.  If you're not familiar with this awesome sci-fi series and its explorations of consciousness, robotics, free will, and the human spirit – go watch the first season right now and then come back and listen to this fun and penetrating chat with Michael Phillip, host of the Third Eye Drops podcast, on what WE think's going on in Westworld...  (Download here.)


0015:  Body Hacking & Sensory Substitution with Trevor Goodman

While I'm in Australia, I'm missing a super fun and interesting event in Austin, The Body Hacking Conference.  Trevor Goodman helps throw this annual celebration of our expanding horizons and bold new approaches to re-imagining the human body.  This conversation gets into some very out-there places – but nothing that won't seem normal in ten years...  (Download here.)

UPCOMING