✨🎸🦖 Leaving SFI for Even Bigger Projects...

I'm building a new website! This is my last blog post at Blogger.
Please follow my updates and new work at MichaelGarfield.Substack.com
and stay tuned for the launch of FutureFossils.org. 💗🖖🏼✨

Announcing A New Book + Book Club on Jurassic Park • Guest Appearances on KMO.show + Rainbow Brainskull • New Live LP + Music Videos + Concert Dates

✨ Saying Goodbye to The Santa Fe Institute

Last Friday was the end of an era. Leaving SFI was not an easy choice, but it is time to synthesize what I have learned from years of complex systems science study and communication in some “grown-up” projects.

Here is my announcement (also pinned to Facebook and to LinkedIn):

🧵 Today is my last day at @sfiscience! It's been an honor and a pleasure to oversee SFI's social media for the last 4.5 years, to launch and grow #ComplexityPodcast into an internationally-charting show, and to work amidst such a thriving and inspiring intellectual community...

🦖 Join My Book Club for Jurassic Park!

What's next? Here is an update on the HUGE undertaking I'm already working on — a new book, book club, and podcast project exploring how the science and philosophy of the Jurassic Park franchise (books, films, games, AND rides) sheds light on and entangles with the evolution of AI, VFX, biotech, and other monsters of modernity since JP’s first edition back in 1990:

Michael Crichton’s legendary techno-thriller is more relevant than ever now…which is why I’m resurrecting the Future Fossils Book Club to explore it! Grab your copy here.

The JP Book Club starts on April 29th and will mix asynchronous discussion in the Facebook group and Discord server with live calls. Patrons get a deep dive into privatized science, the breakdown of the boundaries between reality and virtuality, chaos and complex systems sciences, and science fiction as self-fulfilling prophecy.

There will be at least two live calls for this book, and then more for The Lost World later on this summer. If you have to miss them, they will be recorded.

Then, in the months to come, I'll interview a very heavy-hitting roster of scientists, philosophers, critics, and artists about all this on Future Fossils…including several of the SFI researchers whose planned episodes of Complexity Podcast I had to cancel. These two shows will start to bleed together…Future Fossils will stay weird, but also start to feature more rigor and prestigious guests.
It is a GIANT leap of faith to take this on…I hope you'll grab your front row seats, become a paid subscriber, and help me feed my family while I’m bringing all of this to life!

Read more and weigh in on Facebook or Twitter.

🎸 New Videos + Live LP Reviewed

My latest live recording marries science-inspired folk songs, high-tech improv explorations, and psychoactive concert banter into a truly magic stew I’m glad to share in full with everyone as a Bandcamp exclusive!

Anyone who buys it gets a secret playlist link with videos showcasing twenty extra very juicy minutes from the show (also available to Patreon and Substack members, if you missed that email).

Here is the album’s first review:

"I think this is his best yet...not just a good record but this is an interesting person...worth making an effort to appreciate."

🙏🏼 @WarmthHighest reviews my latest live @Bandcamp-exclusive #psychedelic #folk album: https://birdboyblizzard.music.blog/2023/04/01/a-better-trip-live-at-the-jean-cocteau-cinema-supporting-shane-mauss-by-michael-garfield/ cc @shane_mauss @CocteauCinema

🎧 New Podcast Guest Appearances

Guest on KMO.show Episode 1 (with my buddy Kevin Wohlmut!)

"In this inaugural episode of the KMO Show, KMO, Michael Garfield of the Future Fossils podcast and mutual friend, Kevin Wohlmut, discuss the dawning of the epistemological apocalypse. Thanks to AI, we can't really trust our eyes or our ears anymore. Deep faked images and voices can produce 'evidence' that people said and did things they never said or did. How do we select our reality tunnels when almost anything can be faked in real time? Do we give up on truth seeking and just believe whatever floats our boat, or are there general principals [sic] or trustworthy oracles we can depend on?"

Part one of a two-part trialogue that will conclude on Future Fossils 201. Stay tuned!

Guest on Rainbow Brainskull Episode 81

If you want to hear me at my absolute SLOWEST, then enjoy this conversation I had with Ramin Nazer after pulling an all-nighter taking care of a cranky baby. I'm ordinarily not a fan of people listening to conversations at 2x speed because I try to pack my own episodes with as much information as possible, but in this case I think you might actually get something approximating my ordinary cruising velocity if you did so. Anyway, it was a superb conversation in spite of the fact I was a total mess (and he didn't bother to cinch it up in post-production, which I take to be basically a love letter to my mind, however ill-conceived) and I love Ramin to High Heaven so go show him some love…

🎶 Upcoming Musical Events

I WILL be making audio and video recordings of these shows for everyone who couldn’t make it. But if you live in or near Santa Fe I hope I’ll see you there!

More Info & Presale Tickets

RSVP/Invite @ Facebook Event

More Info

RSVP/Invite @ Facebook Event

New Chill-Out EP + 1:1 Print Series • My Cataract: An Initiation • Upcoming Show in Santa Fe • Custom Hats Are Back!

Life has handed me some lemons, lately. This is my lemonade:

New Instrumental Cyberguitar EP Ephemeropolis

EP & Album Art @ Bandcamp

"Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe, and any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down, and to set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."

- William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature

I've been thinking A LOT lately about home, loss, wandering, fugitivity, transience, and the "new normal" of being forever in transition. None of this is entirely new — these themes have pervaded my entire life — but they've really come to the forefront of my contemplations over the last year, bringing into focus how much of my work emphasizes the temporary and fleeting beauty of our lives. "Castles made of sand," as Jimi Hendrix put it. This latest release makes explicit what has always been implicit in my electroacoustic guitar work especially: the Heraclitean revelation that we never step in the same flow twice...

(So far feedback is unanimously positive; my friends are calling this "a real vibe" and "vibey as fök," if you can see a theme developing...)

It was grown in the summer sun, reaped and winnowed under moonlight, bundled and shipped on the autumnal equinox. It is the harvest from two hours of live performance, leavened and ready to bake in your ears to rise and make fractals in your brain. Recorded live at the Santa Fe Society of Artists pop-up gallery in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 27 August 2022. Improvised on guitar, voice, and electronics. Cover illustration prompted in Midjourney. Dedicated to the burners.

Listen to or purchase it at Bandcamp or add it to your playlists at Spotify or Apple Music.

40 Variations on "Ephemeropolis": An AI Art Collection

Browse & Collect @ MichaelGarfieldArt.com

Unique AI-generated variants for the new EP's cover art. Each variant will only be printed ONCE as an 11"x11" signed print on glossy cardstock; select your variant number at checkout and I will delete the option as soon as I have received your order, guaranteeing you will remain in perpetuity THE ONLY person with that print.

The series is comprised of 40 unique HD designs in total. Think of these as analog NFTs...it's an experiment exploring the fascinating intersection of digital abundance and artificial scarcity, a performance of the flickering and transient nature of the temporary cities from which the EP draws its name.

Every print comes with a free download of the EP in both WAV and MP3 (preview it on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music) AND a link to the image file itself, in case you ever want to replace the original due to damage.

PS — If you want to learn more about my work with, and philosophical musings about, AI artwork, dig into my blog and recent appearances on The Jim Rutt Show and Third Eye Drops Podcast.

New Future Fossils Episode 192 Gets Esoteric

Dig In & Read Extensive Show Notes

This week on Future Fossils I go solo and get reflective on age, noise, loss, mystery, stars and angels, dreams and seasons, modern science and the retrieval of magic...

Because I have a cataract. At age 38. What the hell?

cataract (n.) — early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate, furious rush of water," from Latin cataracta "waterfall," from Greek katarhaktes "waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis," noun use of an adjective compound meaning "swooping, down-rushing," from kata "down" (see cata-). The second element is traced either to arhattein "to strike hard" (in which case the compound is kat-arrhattein), or to rhattein "to dash, break." Its alternative sense in Latin of "portcullis" probably passed through French and gave English the meaning "eye disease characterized by opacity of the lens" (early 15c.), on the notion of "obstruction" (to eyesight).

Join Me on October 14th Live in Santa Fe!

Learn More & RSVP

That's all I can say about this. I've wanted to play a show at Honeymoon since before the pandemic. Their kombucha is amazing. And my daughter is so excited to dance with me during my set, she talks about it every day. Even if it's cold that night, I'm glad to be outdoors for this because there's nothing like the sound of my guitar reflecting off of buildings, pulling in the unsuspecting passers-by, while I gaze into the distance at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as they disappear into the gloaming. MMM.

If I can stream it live, I will.  Subscribe to me on YouTube if you want to know next time I'm live.

I'm Offering Custom Hats Again!

They're back! I was out of the business for years but am now making my custom-painted lids available, taking orders in time to bless up your holidays. I've painted 350 custom lids over the years and cherish the opportunity to make yours (or your loved one's) a totally one-of-a-kind fashion accessory you'll cherish for years to come. Learn more and order yours today.

Follow My Music Discovery Playlist

In parting, a reminder that I share the music that I find and love right here, and while this is a wildly diverse and very long collection you cannot deploy for a specific mood, I hope it serves as inspiration.

Merch Avalanche + Psychedelic Rebrand, New Music + Paintings, Interviewing GPT-3 via Oscar Sharp, New Future Fossils Episodes with Roland Harwood + Lauren Seyler

"We ask our readers not for belief but for doubt of their infallibility.”

– Alfred Russel Wallace

By now most readers of this blog already have a strong opinion about the impact of artificial intelligence on the art world. I've always handled my ambivalence about disruptive new technologies by diving deeper, trying to understand, playing and exploring...I've learned a lot this way, and see it as an integral component of my overall commitment to the complications and complexity of life on Earth. Discomfort is an opportunity for shadow work and curiosity is the antidote to fear.

But it has not been easy: people wrote me hate mail when I beta tested Google Glass; they wrote me hate mail when I minted my first NFTs; and I have similarly caught a lot of flack this year for exploring tools that have a lot of artists justifiably concerned in much the same way that composer John Philip Sousa worried about the economic impact of recorded music. (My friend Michael Jacobs has another, possibly more crucial caution: that, like television, A.I. artwork is a kind of "offshoring" of the human imagination to machines.)

And yet, as someone who has struggled as an artist in an economic system that is outright hostile to the vital work of dreamers, this is just another turn in the ongoing evolution of our synthesis and reconnection with the spirit world as it appears through minerals. (I chatted at some length about this with the legendary Android Jones, another artist I admire for his embrace of every new tool he can get his hands on.)

Those of you who are already members of the Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord Server know it's now a constant conversation in those fora. I feel immensely blessed to have so many people in my circle willing to pursue this inquiry, unflinchingly and with enormous creativity. And I've been sharing all of my own A.I. art experiments with Patreon supporters, and dreaming up new visionary vistas in collaboration with members of the Discord server...there's something special happening here, quite unlike collaborative painting, more like consulting oracles and forming egregores together.

As fast as things are moving in this space, I'm sure that I'll have more to say on all this soon. For now, however, plenty new, exciting news to share — not just about A.I. but also simpler and more obviously soulful human things, like painting with my daughter, making music, and exploring liminality and depth with awesome people on my podcast.

Enjoy, and thanks for tuning in with me:

💅 Future Fossils Gets A Makeover

Explore My Tree of Interesting Links

It's always been my goal to turn this podcast into an umbrella for my work in every medium, and this month I took one big step in that direction with an overdue rebranding. "Future Fossils" is intentionally plurisignative: it points not just to our mortality, to deep time and our role as ancestors-in-training, but to information from the future to which we might be oblivious. It is a speculative fiction game in which we dream up objects from the worlds to come, and a reminder that those speculations will one day feel obsolete, perhaps naïve or foolish. And it's simply fun to say; much like how I have failed to look the part on stage when playing super-trippy music, I have always felt the visual aesthetic of the show fell short in making clear just how intensely psychoactive it can be. Well: FIXED! 

Expect some stickers soon, and plenty more to boot. For now, this GIF:

👕 New Clothing, Home, & Auto Collections

Dive In & Kit Up at Acidmath

Excited to explore the "art director" role with my A.I. experiments in this overdue collab with Acidmath! Pull-over and zippered hoodies, bedding, stairway decals, blankets, tapestries, jigsaw puzzles, rugs, door socks, cloaks, and more are all on offer now to help you rock next season. These are among my favorite of about 10,000 images machines have "dreamt up" at my bidding...just one small slice of four months of obsessive tweaking and discovery in "latent space" — a kind of plenum right next door and full of treasures, horrors, and sublime encounters. Come with me on an adventure into jellyfish metropolis and druid forest temple; play with steampunk insects, flowery dragons, and exotic alien botanicals. New items added all the time!

Quick note: I know I'm not alone in this, but I will say it anyway. This year has been a landslide of surprise expenses and I am immensely grateful for your purchases. If A.I. art is not your thing, I still have plenty of prints and paintings in my store, and would be happy to discuss commissions. Thanks for helping me (for instance) keep my family comfortable by adding heating and AC to our house after two long years without it!

 🎬 Collab with Film-Maker Oscar Sharp & GPT-3

…in which I prompt prospective Future Fossils Podcast guest GPT-3 via my delightfully weird friend, visionary film-maker Oscar Sharp, who notably directed Sunspring, the first screenplay written by artificial intelligence. This “conversation” took place in the summer of 2020, while GPT-3 was still in closed beta. In other words, before it became a part of the routine corporate toolkit for replacing call center workers, copywriters, and other white-collar precariates…before DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion sent my artist friends into an anxious sweat.

(It was, however, three years AFTER I wrote about what was coming in my novelette An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’ — which I’ll continue to harp on about like Cassandra until I can “hire” GPT-3 to do it for me with my UBI unemployability dispensation. That day cannot come too soon, because I’d really like to get back to writing and singing songs all the time. Musicians, at least the ones with duende, have long since disabused ourselves of the conceit of economic utility. We know the economy is blind to the labor that matters most. But I digress.)

It gets weird fast. Let’s begin! Read on at Patreon or Medium.

🎨 Collab Paintings with My Three-Year-Old Daughter

Grab Poster Prints

Teaching my daughter to paint has been not entirely dissimilar to how I work with A.I.: she's a source of chaos that gives me constraints within which to refine and focus a "random seed." It's been truly and deeply gratifying. Plus, it's been delightful to teach her about how making art isn't just about the intrinsic satisfaction but the (potential) financial rewards. We sold these two paintings to friends and she's earned her first toys for herself, as well as squirreled away her own seed savings.

🎸 New (& Old) Musical Adventures

Stream + Download at Bandcamp

Recorded live on solo acoustic guitar and hardware electronic effects at Cosmic Music Festival, Mesa, Arizona, 8 October 2021. The first edition in a new series combining live cyberguitar improvisations with psychoactive excerpts from my favorite texts and similarly sample-based inventive remixes for the eye: visual glitch, generative art, and digital collage.

Also available as an NFT on the Polygon blockchain at Mintsongs.

Stream + Download at Bandcamp

Recorded live at a secret island party on the then-invisible-to-Google-Maps Snake Island on Town Lake in Austin, Texas — a Mad Hatter's tea party to which all of us had to lug our equipment on motorized rafts (which made for quite the voyage back against the current of the Colorado River and nearly resulted in me and my wife losing our musical instruments in the water).

This is a time-edited 18-minute cut of a 30-minute performance, echoing with the carnival-cathedral atmosphere of this bizarre psychedelic social experiment amidst the oaks of a Lost World in the middle of a high-tech metropolis.

All three tracks feature my beloved Nicole Taylor for a rare guest appearance on viola, which I sampled and remixed into my looping rig with the Boss RC-505. Light some incense and enjoy!

Also available as an NFT on the Polygon blockchain at Mintsongs.

🎧 New Podcast Episodes

Episode + Show Notes

This week on the show I chat with the storied, insightful, multidimensional Roland Harwood — a “compulsive connector,” generalist, “failed astronaut,” pianist, Founder, CEO, Trustee, impresario of international collective intelligence projects, and generally fascinating person. In a conversation that already feels somewhat archaeological (it was recorded in November 2021 and references discussions that have already developed significantly over the last year), we explore the martial art of living in transition, of thriving in the in-between spaces, of dealing with the unpredictable and the fundamental uncertainty of our lives. We also rap on the subjects of innovation, global weirding, organizational evolution, technology, hope, and happiness...

Episode + Show Notes

This week we’re joined by Lauren Seyler, Assistant Professor of Biology at Stockton University, who studies the microscopic living world that flourishes in dark places: the mud of coastal marshes, inside rocks, and in sediments at the bottom of the sea. She’s also co-authored a number of publications on how scientists can work ethically with Indigenous peoples, and applies her scientific research to questions of astrobiology: the search for life and intelligence in outer space. In this episode, we discuss the life/non-life boundary, evolution as thermodynamics, anaerobic microbes as the invisible labor supporting all life on Earth, the origin of life: in the light, or in the dark?, the wonderful world of -omics, individual vs. Institutional agency and the necessary revolution of consciousness required for effective collective action at planetary scale, power and responsibility, best practices for working with the Indigenous as a scientist, stepping up to biospheric stewardship, and practicing right relations across scales (not just micro-macro but also across space and time).

✨ Parting Thought:

"To no one type of mind is it given to discern the totality of truth."

- William James

A.I. Art Eruption: The Wildest Period of My Art Career is Right Now (Plus New Music, Podcasts, Public Talks, & Thoughts on Human-Tech Co-Evolution)

I finally surrender to letting these roughly-monthly updates be a magazine unto themselves. This one is about a very hot topic right now: the explosion of A.I.-assisted artwork that you've surely seen sprouting up all over the Web, and my experimentation with it. I've always believed that the future would empower "professional dreamers" to share their inner worlds instantaneously, and it feels like that vision is finally substantiating itself in our waking world. But not all is rosy in this magical future, and I'm honored to help act as psychopomp on the River of Souls we're crossing together as these new tools mature and transform society.

But first, an announcement for the thousands of you in my active online fora:

✨ Big Changes for Future Fossils!

After years of volunteering dozens of hours a week in a patrons-only Facebook group and Discord server mostly populated by free riders, I'm finally clearing out the non-patrons and restoring some focus and sanctity to the community we've built together. Spending so much time moderating non-subscribers has been taking time away from podcast production and my family, but I also don't have the heart to just nuke this group. If you'd like to stay involved please consider signing up for at least $2 a month for the part-time job it is to curate and moderate this group.

Let me clarify that old close friends, former guests of the show, and other people who routinely and consistently add value to this group are welcome to remain regardless of whether you're contributing financially. There are many ways to do this, so if you're broke but interested in staying involved please respond to me privately.

✨ There Is No One Path Forward: Pluralism in Science, Philosophy, & Art

A digestible, albeit light-speed, six-minute-and-forty-second talk on the virtues of and need for pluralism, presented at Creative Santa Fe's Pecha Kucha Talks last month. 

You can find their (audio-and-slides-only) presentation on the Pecha Kucha website, or find my own video recording and extensive supplementary notes and resources on Patreon.

Abstract:

Biodiversity is the measure of ecological health. Cognitive diversity is the secret to innovation and effective collaboration. And contrary to popular belief, there will never be one Theory of Everything to unify all of human knowledge in an equation that fits on a t-shirt. Multiplicity is how the cosmos knows itself, because all models of the world — whether they take the form of intellectual theories or organisms in an ongoing dance of adaptation with their environment — are partial, incomplete, and provisional. Every statement of truth is a conjecture based on limited information, conditioned by a specific history, and ultimately up for revision. Even the myriad standards by which we settle on satisfactory explanations are in tension and conflict with each other — and that's a good thing, because unanimous agreement results in brittle, easily disrupted strategies. If humankind stands any chance of navigating the immensely complex challenges we face, it's time for us to jettison the notion that there's One Idea To Rule Them All, and fan out into "The Adjacent Possible," covering as much ground as we can to search the space of what could be more comprehensively.

✨ AI Art Experiments Stash

Lately I've kind of lost myself in the rapture of exploring text-to-image AI art prompts on the invite-only platform Midjourney, which is (at least in some respects) considerably more advanced than similar apps like NightCafé and Wombo Dream.

Part of this is my lifelong commitment to guinea-pigging myself with new creative tools, starting with my immersion into Google Glass and the resultant contemplation on the co-evolution of surveillance technologies and the self (see essay parts 1, 2, 3, 4). Exploring AI-assisted mass production of works that would, just two years ago, have each taken 20-50 hours to paint...well, I'm hardly the only artist that feels drawn into this as a necessary precursor to navigating the disruption of the creative sector by these tools.

In the meantime, I want to give patrons exclusive access to my curated "dream stream" of Midjourney experiments — feel free to download any of these images you like for personal use: wallpapers, desktops, one-off pillow/t-shirt printing, whatever floats your boat.

Here are some of the most exciting images to have emerged from AI "latent space" lately:

✨ Podcasts on AI, Art, and Philosophy

The above experiments have led to a whole series of fantastic conversations on the direction things are moving, how it connects to ancient esoteric practices, the labor market implications, and how I'm engaging with the mysterious Other through these tools.  Here are three solid recordings on this and related topics:

But of course it also raises deep philosophical issues, like those I recently discussed on The Jim Rutt Show with Jim and my friend and frequent Future Fossils guest J.F. Martel — questions of what art even is, whether sentience is required, what if anything is uniquely human, and how different art might be in another few years' time. I recommend digging into that discussion — and staying tuned for more, because this is a conversation I consider very squarely in the Future Fossils wheel house, and more urgent than most people seem to realize.

One conversation wasn't enough so I ALSO just appeared on my friend Michael Phillip's show Third Eye Drops to talk about Google engineer Blake Lemoine's claims of AI sentience and machine ensoulment, labor market disruptions from new creative tools like Midjourney, and what it's like to "breed" images straight out of the ethers of the imagination.

From Shane's show notes: "In this episode, I catch up with my good friend, Michael Garfield. Michael is the host of the Future Fossils podcast and the Complexity podcast. In his 4th appearance on Here We Are, we discuss topics like fatherhood, lifestyle changes, and the ever-changing world we live in."

✨ Recommended Resources on Human-Technology Egregores

I recently got into a very deep and intense conversation with Carnegie Mellon/SFI Professor Simon DeDeo during his latest visit to the Santa Fe Institute campus. (Check out his talk and my Twitter coverage of it, which I found equal parts nightmarish and utterly inspiring.)

Most of that two hours was spent in roundtable discussion with him and our 2022 cohort of Undergraduate Complexity Researchers, making for the most exciting opportunity I've ever had at work to blow the minds of a bunch of awesome, brilliant twenty-somethings.

Here is the epic mind-dump I sent them afterward, collecting resources that came to mind during our rap session. If you've been following the show for a while you've probably heard me bring most of these up at one point or another, but I'm happy to share them all in one place.

I apologize in advance for what my buddy Mitch Mignano would call an "ecodelic avalanche." Enjoy either spending the rest of time getting around to this or immediately binning it all to preserve your mental health!

(Album cover is from my ongoing series of AI art experiments with Midjourney, which as mentioned above I'm archiving for the personal use of my patrons.)

✨ New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Listen/Subscribe here.

Listen/Subscribe here.

✨ New Music: Live at the West China Tea House (Austin, Texas 2022.05.28)

Member-exclusive HD download on Patreon or Bandcamp.

On the musical front, here's an intimate "storyteller" format acoustic and electroacoustic concert spanning fourteen years of songwriting, with some teahouse-specific improvisations to accompany gong fu tea ceremony. This was my first show in Austin, Texas in nearly four years, a very emotionally intense reunion with old friends and the land I love and once called home. Big thanks to So Han Fan and Nate Bell at the West China Tea House for making space for me to play a family-friendly concert (you can hear my kids screaming throughout) and for the live Future Fossils Podcast I taped there in between sets with Kevin Welch and David Hensley of EFF-Austin!

(If you want a blast from the past (or into the future?), I played one of my favorite late-night instrumental sets at their pop-up tea house at Utopia Festival back in 2017, when they were still called the Guan Yin Tea House.)

Lastly, for now, here's a link to my ever-growing Spotify playlist of new music discoveries and old favorites. I've been keeping and cultivating this for three years now, and it's EXTENSIVE, over 37 hours long. Enjoy!:

New Showcase Painting • New Concert Album + Music Videos • Future Fossils: Chris Ryan, Jim Rutt, Web3 + Complex Systems, Metamodern Magick, & More

“Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe."

– Karl Schwarzschild

Buckle up, friends. This is the most epic edition of this newsletter in its thirteen years of existence...

I recommend opening this in a new tab to devour at your leisure, like my current long-game effort to assemble the Lego "Tumbler" Batmobile.  :)

Happy Year of the Tiger!

NEW ART

"My Bright Companions"

acrylic paint on masonite panel

48"w x 32"h

original available + canvas & cardstock prints here

My first big new painting since before the pandemic! This piece started as part of my science communication fellowship at the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, live painting to amazing talks on evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cyborg experiments, animal intelligence research, and more — and finally came to a satisfying conclusion at my temporary retirement from live painting at a recent Mary Lattimore + Walt McClements + Michael Garfield show here in Santa Fe.

It's the sequel to my 2017 painting "My Dark Companion" and an exercise in visionary-art-as-science-fiction, paying tribute to Terence McKenna, biologist Michael Levin, and many others.

Here's more info about the piece on Patreon and a picture of it with human creator for size comparison on Instagram.

Oh!  And I'll add:  I still have just over a dozen paintings available, most of them rather large and pricey (but flexibly so).  I also have two kids and all the patience in the world when it comes to paying off an exchange like this, so if you're interested in one of these, let's talk.

NEW MUSIC

Download in lossless audio at Bandcamp 

Save & Follow at Spotify 

Listen at Audius (where artists get 90% of streaming royalties)

Speaking of "the first in over two years," MY GOD how I needed a return to the stage!  Musical performance has been woefully absent from my life over the last two years since my last public gig at Meow Wolf opening for Papadosio in December 2019 — even if you count my asynchronous collaboration with archaeologist Liane Gabora for her research on the paleolithic Löwenmensch sculpture and my livestream with painter Amanda Sage for the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam.

I even got a (pre-show) write-up from the wonderful Adrian Gomez in the Albuquerque Journal!

AND I managed to get some decent concert footage.  Here are two new live concert videos of my philosophy-complex-systems-protest song "Seeing Like A State":

And of my cyberacoustic guitar improvisation, "Wing It":

NEW PODCASTS

And of course I spend most of my time talking to people about important ideas. This last few months has been especially rich and rewarding. Just take a look at these (and then, hopefully, also, listen):

I've dropped these two excellent and soulful sessions as well for Patreon supporters:

MENTIONS

Thanks to Cris Beasley for pushing my Future Fossils episode with Time Loops author Eric Wargo on her incredibly cool and fun Becoming Dragon Substack in a special issue on lucid dreaming.

I am similarly honored that the Plutopia News Network (c/o my friend and low-key living legend Jon Lebkowsky) felt it similarly worthwhile to point people in my direction in THEIR newsletter, alongside the badasses John Coltrane, Bruce Sterling, and Marc Frauenfelder.

NEW MUSIC DISCOVERY PLAYLIST

Lastly, here is a link to the new playlist I'm starting for delicious musical discoveries.  I don't really like Spotify as a company but it's nonetheless still a great place to turn other people on to music I enjoy:

Enter the Vortex

And that's all she wrote.  :)  Thanks for reading!

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