What is the Opposite of Fear? + The Evolution of Beauty + Talk & Music from COSM + JF Martel on Future Fossils

“Ultimately, art does have a function: it’s to help us better navigate the infinite chaos that is reality.”
– JF Martel

Yay, it's spring!  Time to navigate the chaos of 2017 with grace, open-mindedness, exuberance, and playfulness.  Here are some things that, hopefully, will help you with that – starting with a few quick videos and one extremely deep and magical discussion...

New Videos

On my recent tour of Oz, I stopped by Uplift Connect to chat with them about what I've learned from studying the fossil record and what it can teach us about the extraordinary times we're living in.

Here's a quick two-minute takeaway insight I hope serves you as well as it serves me.

I think this is the coolest video I've ever made – in which I lay it plain how sex, art, and consciousness all intersect and led to the creation of the world we know.  Bookmark this for when you have seven minutes to appreciate it.

It's a 360º time-lapse live painting video of my first collaboration with my friends Randal Roberts and Morgan Mandala, two of the coolest people I know.  But the real magic sauce is in how the music and narration combine with this video to create a synesthetic, synergetic and emergent something-greater-than-its-parts.

I literally spooked myself with the synchronicities of the end result.  Enjoy!

New Podcast

My latest inspiring conversation about the cosmos is with JF Martel, film-maker and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice – as well as the three-part essay "Reality is Analog," about the philosophical themes lurking behind Netflix's series Stranger Things.

You can download it here or subscribe to the show on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

New Music & Talk from COSM

Stream or Download it here.  

Recorded live on 12 November 2016 at COSM, Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, in Wappingers Falls, New York.  Performed on acoustic guitar, voice, and hardware effects pedals (no computers, no prerecorded samples, entirely live and improvised).

This music is an invocation of creative spirit for the benefit of all beings. Recommended listening environments: painting parties, cuddle puddles, chillout sessions, game night, long daylight drives, and making love...

33% of sales go to supporting the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and their project to build Entheon, a museum of visionary art.

Stream or Download here.

Delivered at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (Wappingers Falls, New York) on 12 November 2016, this talk – my first at COSM – was truly epic (three hours, minus the half-hour of pauses and throat-clearing I edited out for your benefit). Based on the work of Penn State professor Richard Doyle – especially his book, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – this is a talk about art as magic, and awareness as the medium of all creative work.

It's about how we got here and what we're doing and how the cosmic table's tilted in favor of evermore creative and intelligent ideas and organisms. It's about your purpose in the world and where this ride is taking us and how you can embrace the change and chaos for a more creative and rewarding life...

New Merch

I've been slacking on my society6 merchandise shop for a while, so I just fixed that with dozens of new items featuring some of my favorite recent pieces.  If you have a new device or space, consider fancying it up with some of these new decals, cases, pillows, notebooks, tapestries, etc.  ...

That's all for now.  Thank you for reading and have a magnificent week!

love

Michael

Sneak Peek at my new Dinosaur Painting • Coming Down from CoSM • Live Looping Pedalboard Teardown • New Live Album • Read the First Few Sections of my Book • My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016 • And I Love You

It's been a crazy autumn, friends. I pray that it's been relatively smooth for you, and that you recognize your challenges as collective opportunities for learning, growth, and evolution. May we live in interesting times! It may be hard to keep up the enthusiasm for a transformation that could stretch out past our lifespans, to contribute all we have to building something we won't live to see completed. But that is the human project. Keep with it and I will do the same.

If there's anything that I can do to help you find your peace or purpose through the madness, let me know.

Meanwhile, I'll continue working on what gives my struggles in this life a sense of meaning. Right now that means a book, a studio album, and a podcast, each of them focused on the complicated blessing of a human life in this specific time.

My Patreon subscribers have an inside track with all of this, including early access and exclusive content – plus, the benefits of knowing that you're helping me give everything to spreading messages of inspiration:

Now for all the new work.  As always, thanks for reading – and may you discover all of your forgotten blessings, like a twenty in your jeans...

Sneak Peek: New Dinosaur Painting

Here are some sneak peeks of an epic dinosaur piece that I'm working on right now, another window into that revisionist prehistory, The Psychedelic Age of Dinosaurs, I started with these pieces of Tyrannosaurus, Carnotaurus, Spinosaurus, Nanotyrannus, and Triceratops.

Subscribe to me on Instagram for "stories," videos, and other fun ephemera as this piece comes together.  It's already shaping up to be one of my most intensely detailed, luminous, and weird live paintings yet...

Hummingbird Blankets Available to Order!

It's time again!  I only have a few of these lovely woven cotton blankets on hand that I can ship in time for Christmas – once they're gone, the wait time goes back up to 6-8 weeks, so if you would like to order one of these for someone now's the time!  Grab one here (or share this link on wishlists).

Coming Down from CoSM

I just played (and spoke) at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York!  CoSM is an amazing place, a worldwide hub for visionary art.  My offerings felt very overdue.  It's one thing to feel part of a "noetic polity," a community of mind, and quite another to ground that connection face-to-face, together in a place and time.  I finally saw and felt what the Greys are building firsthand and it was a truly humbling weekend.

Both my three-hour presentation and my instrumental live set will be made available for free to Patreon supporters soon (and to everyone else sometime in the New Year).

Meanwhile, here's a selfie that my painter hero asked to take with me.  :)

Live Looping Guitar Pedalboard Teardown

I would like to make more of an effort to put my skills to work by training other people (in guitar, live looping, paint pens, live art, and whatever else you think that you could learn from me).  Skype lessons are one way so let me know if you are into that – another is this walkthrough of my rig:

"Guitar Moderne reader Michael Garfield has a natural science-based perspective on looping and live sampling that is mind expanding. He also offers some straight, nuts-and-bolts info about his gear and how he uses it."

Read all about how I turn one guitar into a symphony of glitched-out cybernetic awesomeness at Guitar Moderne (my favorite blog for experimental guitar).

New Live Release: Austin, Texas 2015-11-11

While I continue grinding away at my book, podcast, and first album of actual SONGS in many years, here's a peek at some of those songs in their earliest public appearance, stripped down solo acoustic, still finding their legs but obviously chomping at the bit and rearing at the gate.

New songs here range the gamut of geek, from a piece about Jurassic Park coming true ("Life Finds A Way") to a piece of gonzo journalism from the space between birth and death ("Indecision") to a weirdly tropical number about the neurophysiology of awakening ("Always Catching Up").

You'll also hear some time-tested versions of old fan favorites like "You Don't Have To Move" and "Let It All Get Out" sprawling into lengthy and weird looping explorations, and – this is a storyteller format set – listen to a lot of weirdo ragged banter between me and everyone who was there for my girlfriend's birthday...  Stream or download it on Bandcamp.  (This one is free to my subscribers.)

Read the First Few Sections of my Coming Book

Here's the preface and first two short chapters of the book I'm writing, How To Live in the Future.  It's an evolutionary tour of hyperspace that hopefully helps people find their way through all the change of our extraordinary century.  It begins with an homage to Archeopteryx, my spirit animals, and possibly the most important fossil ever found.

We humans are creatures of becoming, works-in-process – just like the legendary Archeopteryx, the so-called "First Bird" whose discovery in 1861 was the first fossil evidence of evolution by natural selection. Half bird, half reptile, Archeopteryx has much to teach us as we navigate this turbulent transition from apes to angels.  This piece I originally wrote for Projections Magazine may well become the preface to my book.  Read it here.

My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016

In this talk I conjured up an even more ambitious bouquet of ideas than usual, constellated around the work of Penn State information scientist Richard Doyle and the argument that art and language grew from psychoactive interspecies intercourse.

What does the evolution of the Mind-At-Large teach us about the role of creativity in culture? How do artists function as the organs of erotic signaling within the selves-enjoying superorganism of the Biosphere? What is the highest purpose art can serve?

All these questions – and more – will be danced around, linked, juggled, entertained, and possibly even answered in this mind-expanding thoughtstream as it makes its way to spill out in the Ocean of Primordial Awareness...  Stream or download it here for free.

And, Lastly:

Gift yourself the glowing warmth and satisfaction that you get with patronage this season, and get your front-row seat to my creativity in every medium.  It is 1000 times more awesome than just getting emails from me – I host ask-me-anythings, you can connect with other patrons and meet new friends, and you get your name in the acknowledgments when I release the book and album:

Thanks again for reading and may all your days and nights be full of sweet embodied ease!  Now:

"Find what you love and follow it to glory.”

- Abraham Simpson

I'm Teaching at COSM! How To Live in the Future Part 2. Future Fossils Episode 10. Third Eye Drops. Live Looping. Understanding Ayahuasca.

“It’s always nice to start a religion with a miracle.”

– Alex Grey

Hey, folks.  It's time to knuckle down and make great things.

...I hope that what I do makes life a little brighter for you:

So I'm Teaching A Workshop at COSM!

I'm teaching my first workshop (and playing my first concert) at Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors this weekend! It's based on the work of information scientist and mystic sci-fi scholar Richard Doyle, whose work on the co-evolution of animal courtship with psychoactive plants refigures human selfhood as an aspect of ecology.  If we are something that the Earth is doing – if attention is the way that energy and information move through ecosystems – artists of all kinds are cosmic router switches, working on the only medium:  awareness.

Join us there.  If you can't make it, I'll record and share both facets with my Patreon supporters.

How To Live in the Future (Part 2)

"If you plan to live in the future, you have failed already: one of its defining traits is that it’s unpredictable... Every moment’s an inflection point between the end and the beginning of innumerable stories flowing in all possible directions."

I'm writing a book-length essay of psychedelic prose on evolution, technology, and how to navigate our ever-weirdening world.  Here's part two at Metapsychosis Journal.  Here's part one.

Endorse my leap of faith to serve the world as a full-time idea-splicing agent of visionary reconnaissance:

I'm writing this abovementioned book (and publishing this podcast, and recording this studio album) with the support of a small community of awesome fans at Patreon.  Patreon is a website that empowers independent creators and helps us make a sustainable living – my supporters pitch in however much they like each month and get some very special treatment as a gesture of my thanks – as well as a much closer and more rewarding relationship than is possible through social media.  Check it out!

Future Fossils S1:E10
with Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz

Subscribe to us on iTunes // Episode Permalink

In this special double episode, we're joined by musician-wizards Anthony Thogmartin (Earth Cry, Papadosio) and David Krantz (Futexture, former Moog Music employee, and director of psychoacoustics at Apeiron Center) in which we have a crazy conversation about:

- creative process workflow time loops and the difference of looping over minutes or years
- artificially intelligent digital simulacra of ourselves, exploring alternate biographies
- analog modular synthesis as collaborating with a living creature
- random number generators and the ghost in the machine - collective consciousness
- tripping with cats and electronics
- sensitive instruments detecting invisible realities and scalar waves
- synchronizing people with trees, brains with other brains, and other entrainment weirdness
- Data Garden’s MIDI Sprout and using plant vibrations to control robotic servos and welcome vegetable intelligence into human political discourse
- the anechoic chamber and psychoacoustic biofeedback programming the human body
- video chat telepresence barbershop quartets

Yeah, it's good.  There are nine other episodes up there for you already, and many more to come...

I also recently appeared again on Third Eye Drops, one of my favorite podcasts. Episode 28 features a conversation between host Michael Philip, scientist Bruce Damer, and myself. Episode 29 includes a shorter chat with me about what message I would send my younger self – along with similar chats with Mitch Schultz, Rick Strassman, and Daniele Bolleli.

Article on Group Looping at LoopingLive.com

For the last few years, I've hosted Loopers' Night and Paint Jam, residencies for experimental live looping music collaborations.

Group looping improvisation is like weight training while simultaneously freestyle rapping – it requires players to learn a set of common basic gestures and commands to adequately guide each other. However, it only works when everyone is in a flow state and can turn together like a flock of birds with zero hesitation when the music asks for it.  Read the whole piece.

19 November Gig in New York City

Understanding Ayahuasca – w/ Alex & Allyson Grey, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ralph Metzner, Daniel Pinchbeck, Allan Badiner, Steven White, Esthela Calderón, and Skytree

I'm playing music – that is, taking people on a journey through the transcendental textures of acoustic electronic steel-string spaceship instrumentals – for the evening part of this event.

RSVP & Tickets Here.

“It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. No artist is pleased.”

– Martha Graham

...in which I share my 360 Travelogue of Boom Festival & Portugal, announce the Future Fossils Podcast on iTunes, share my slow motion new music video, tell you "How to Live in the Future," spread Third Eye Drops with Erik Davis, support the Ayahuasca Reader, and launch my Patreon Campaign.

“We live on the leash of our senses. Although they enlarge us, they also limit and restrain us, but how beautifully. Love is a beautiful bondage, too.”

– Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

Hello, my amazing invisible extended self existing in the gauzy web of long-term friendships and connections made since this blog started in the misty dawn age of 2008!  I'm finally back from my first experience of Europe and I have so many great treasures ready for you to enjoy.

It's been a totally transformative summer for me, both good and bad.  The hardest part is always coming home and trying to make sense of all the lessons...so while I sort that out, here is the first round of my offerings to you, beginning with the photosphere travelogue of my experience in Portugal.

(All of this is freely given to you and the commons. There's nothing here to purchase. If you would like to show support, subscribe to me on Patreon or Bandcamp – or if you're broke, just share it with your friends. Whatever you can do is more appreciated than you know.)

360º Photos from Portugal & Boom Festival 

I spent my three weeks in Portugal taking as many beautiful 360º shots as possible.  Boom was supremely beautiful (both for its quieter and louder moments), but I also managed to great plenty of great shots while hanging out in Lisbon (and the world's best hostel); Cerro de Janeiro (an awesome workaway in Odemira); Sintra (a landscape of awesome ancient castles and a UNESCO world heritage site); and Cabo da Roca (the westernmost point of continental Europe).

Here they are:

View the full set (200+ photos without captions) on Google Plus.

View a select handful of photos with mini-stories about each one on Facebook.

Every one of these can be explored by clicking on the image, then scrolling with your mouse or touchscreen to explore the whole environment.  It was a trip to work with this new photographic medium that captures everything around the camera – you can't escape the "selfie" but it renders the photographer as part of an entire scene, more accurate than both the selfie and the old tradition of remaining hidden from behind the camera.

Feel free to leave your comments and questions!  I'll be happy to respond to every one of them.

Future Fossils Podcast FINALLY on iTunes & Stitcher!

Subscribe/Rate/Review on iTunes

Subscribe/Rate/Review on Stitcher

For everyone who loves a deep dive into the weird, wild, and wonderful, my podcast with cohost Evan "Skytree" Snyder, Future Fossils, is finally live on the major podcast syndication platforms and ready to water your brains with delicious crystals of expanding contemplation.

We've put SO much work into this podcast and there are already some amazing conversations up there, with folks like comedian Shane Mauss, origins of life researcher Bruce Damer, author Tony Vigorito, director Mitch Schultz (DMT: The Spirit Molecule), and cyborg anthropologist Maraya Karena – plus some very 

Coming soon, episodes with author Kingsley L. Dennis, sociologist Ashley Dawson, musicians Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio & EarthCry) and David Krantz (Futexture) – as well as a few amazing field interviews from Boom Festival with tantric unicorn Shaft Uddin, visionary artist Mark Lee, and Rupert Till, aka "Dr. Chill" (the first person to ever receive a PhD in electronic music, who has 3D printed reconstructions of the earliest known instruments and used them in his set!).

(We also have a Facebook Group, if you would like to join the conversation.)

Music Video: "Lambent" w/ 320 fps Bubble Glory

Download this album on Bandcamp

Stream this album on Spotify

1/8th speed bubble awesomeness I shot on site at Highberry Music Festival to the music I improvised last fall for Aubrey Marcus' fundraiser for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

Performed and recorded live in one take on guitar, voice, and effects. Slow motion video shot on a Samsung Galaxy S5 at Highberry Festival (Mulberry Mountain, Arkansas), June 2016.

If you're like me, you will appreciate how well the music syncs up with the iridescent shimmering mystique of evanescent membranes, rippling as they float through summer air...

"How To Live in the Future" at Metapsychosis Journal

My first piece for an awesome new web magazine, Metapsychosis.  Their roster of contributors is out of this world – definitely worth some exploration if you like reading that expands your consciousness.

"When I attempt to visualize 'the future' as I learned to think of it in childhood, I see the image of a silvery, metallic, shifting sphere – presumably, the boundary of some 4D portal casting shadows into the mere three dimensions that my pitiable primate eyes can see. Whether this is my enculturated mind presenting something physics experts tell me is the probable appearance of a window into other times; or whether it’s a genuine prophetic third-eye vision of the portal through which we can gaze at all of our innumerable futures; or it’s allegory and the image represents the Noöspheric nanotech that wraps our planet in a skin of thinking mercury; or I am actually observing my own body from the point of view of someone living in the future, someone who has cybernetic eyes and sees the spherical magnetic field projected by my heart, I do not know. Perhaps it’s all of these." 

Read the whole piece here.

New Third Eye Drops Podcast with Erik Davis

Another superb conversation with Third Eye Drops Podcast and Erik Davis – probably my favorite so far – in which we somehow connected augmented reality and Pokémon GO, the evolutionary benefits (and lurking evil) of cuteness, whether we should resist the torrent of technological innovation (and whether we even can), the promise and peril of inventing our own realities, and some exciting evidence that we can create quantum entangled brain states between gamers – technologically facilitated telepathy!

If you don't know Erik Davis' amazing work, or haven't heard my handful of appearances on his own awesome podcast Expanding Mind (here and here), this is a great place to start.

Unreleased Album as Perk for Ayahuasca Reader Campaign

My friends at Synergetic Press have done it again; they've put together a world-class compilation of essays and articles on a Very Important Topic.  Here's the link to buy this book and score a free copy of Duende, my unreleased electric guitar live set from Sonic Bloom's SolPurpose Visionary Art Academy.  (These were the tunes I played for Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala's visionary art class during the live painting session – very different music than what I'm used to coming out of me.)  A few words on this book:

The high-technology media ecosystems of our future, and the people we will become to live in them, have more in common with the spirit-infused Amazon than the abstract conceptual realities we inhabited as moderns. It is no surprise, but poetry, that ayahuasca shows up now to take the world stage and help us navigate these nascent, tangled and mysterious collective spaces: a perfect teacher for an age in which we have to learn that we (and our artifacts) are something Earth is doing – and "intelligence" (be it animal, or vegetable, or mineral) is everywhere around us. 

Anyone committed to inhabiting a future of AI, mesh networks, bioengineering, solar power, neuromarketing, and other tech-assisted wizardry should sink their roots into this awesome book and draw as much of its deep wisdom as they can – because the curanderos, daring scientists, and visionary artists represented here are voices in the vanguard helping us to understand what it will really mean to be an Earthling in the years to come.

Buy Ayahuasca Reader & get Duende for free, because I want to see this book succeed.

Upcoming Events

Launching Future Fossils Podcast | New Collaboration Paintings with John Speaker, Tourmaline Todd, and The Deer | Interview in Knew Revolution #1

"I just want to inspire curiosity in people, more than any specific question. 

Curiosity is the cure for depression and despair."

– MG in Knew Revolution Issue 1

Listen to our first two episodes.

Join our Facebook Discussion Group.

Future Fossils is the new podcast I cohost with Evan "Skytree" Snyder, a masterful electronic music producer and industrial engineer with whom I've collaborated regularly since we first met in 2012 as performers at the South By Southwest party for the documentary film, DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

It's about time!  All kinds of time.  Our first two episodes explore Chronos & Cairos – the measurement and felt experience of time, respectively – the quantity and quality – the numbers and the feelings.  Does time REALLY have a direction or a shape?  Maybe the Big Bang and the Black Hole are the same object seen from two different "angles" and time's actually a double helix.  We go deep and deliciously weird.  

Enjoy episodes 1 & 2 on Bandcamp while we get our iTunes/Stitcher syndication going, and weigh in with your thoughts in our discussion group.

New Collaborations with John Speaker & Tourmaline Todd

And New Live Painting for The Deer

Speaking of time, one of its consequences is new art!  Click on each image for the story of the piece, close-up magnifier view, and how you can order prints:

"Magic Eye Paisley"
Collaboration with John Speaker

"Portal Pudding"
Collaboration with Tourmaline Todd

"LSDeer"
Painted live for The Deer, Blue Healer, and Holiday Mountain

Feature Interview in Knew Revolution, Issue 1

From the feature interview in KnewRevolution Issue 1, in which I offer my best definition of "visionary art," discuss identity beyond names, and say more with less:

"You and I emerge from genius, like legged fish from oceans. We may think we're separate but nonetheless we're still made of genius. It’s the vast intelligence that guides our actions and transcends the subject-object language that we’re stuck employing to describe it."

"Festivals are supremely valuable as an opportunity to create spaces between spaces, places for people to meet in uniquely vulnerable ways and learn and share with one another in the discovery and creation of new forms of social interaction and identity. But too many of them are weaponized consumer pit traps, and even the ones that try their best to be conscious still have to play by the broken system in which they take place. So they’re not, as I once thought, a way to make a living, nor are they sustainable as a way of life. But neither are desserts or holidays, and they enrich our lives immeasurably. All in right proportion."

"The more popular something gets, the more easy it is to sell, and so the real fringe keeps on moving. The molten frontier of human evolution isn’t standing still waiting to be mainstreamed, and as a rule of physics it never will be, because it keeps moving. What’s normal today was revolutionary a generation ago."

Read the first issue of Knew Revolution.

Upcoming Adventures