✨🎸🦖 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

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

🎉 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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And Now For Something Completely Different! New Music, Art, Writing, & Talks To Get Your Mind Off The Apocalypse

Hello, beloveds. It takes almost no effort at all to double down on the spookiness of this time of year, so let's at least have some fun with it, zoom out, and let me help remind you of the deeper currents in which we're all swimming with some of the best work I have ever produced.

I am honored to share with you, in this edition of the newsletter:

— a new psychedelic folk song it took me over twelve years to write and produce;

— a new electronic guitar improvisation I made as part of a peer-reviewed archaeology paper;

— the final (?) installment of my essay series on augmented reality and evolutionary arms races;

— my presentation on deepfakes for The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks;

— my logo design mockups for the South West Science Writers' Association;

— two excellent Future Fossils episodes on the pro-social and anti-social applications of deepfakes;

— my guest appearance on the delightful Talk of Today podcast; and

— my guest appearance on the equally delightful Plutopia News Happy Hour.

Lastly, as a pure and unadulterated offering, check out the extensive Future Fossils Wavescapes Spotify Playlist I've been secretly brewing for you good people over the last couple months. It's excellent.

I suggest optimizing for synergy by listening to my new tunes while you read the new pieces and then listening to the podcasts while you do whatever urgent work you assuredly have to do right now...

Let these be not bids for your attention but gifts to help lift you into a better state of mind, an invitation to enjoy some highly-polished and substantial treats — nourishment for your mind, heart, and soul.

Thank you and wishing you the best through all the turbulence.

love,

Michael

PS — Here's the jack-o-lantern that I carved this year, because how could I not:

My Crowning Musical Accomplishment:

"You Don't Have To Move" Finally Gets Studio Treatment

Listen on All Major Streaming Platforms

Twelve years ago I wrote a song on a trampoline at Burning Man inspired by UFO sightings and apocalyptic dreams I had after getting out of college and watching the plans I'd had for my entire life fall to pieces.

Since then I've carried that song with me and cultivated it across a 30-stop national tour, dozens of festivals on three continents, and half a dozen interstate moves...and it's grown ferns and gemstones, doubled in length, and continued to fold in all of the new guitar techniques I learned along the way to stand as a living record of everything I know about the instrument and how to plug it into electronics and transform it into other things entirely.

Until this year, though, it had no definitive recording. Never made it to the studio — my life just moved too fast. It was the flagship of an album I'd been promising the world for years but then I got a job and had a kid and had to stop the touring, and the timeline kept receding. Seemed like I would never get this done.

And then we all got quarantined for months and suddenly I was back in the saddle with recording — and NEW songs started coming faster than they ever have, and it's now all that I can do to get the old ones finished and the new ones down before the next batch tumble in and add another album to the FOUR that I'm now planning...

It turns out that this song had wisdom in it that I never heeded and I never understood until it came true in my life: that you don't have to go out there to see the world, but if you stay in one place long enough the whole world comes to you. You truly, truly do not have to move.

And so it's with immense excitement I announce today's the day that "You Don't Have To Move" is now complete and published on TIMEWHEEL, an awesome group that I've been eager to contribute to since 2012! With everything else that's been going on this year it's almost hard to savor this accomplishment but this weird autumn flower is a consummation of a lifelong process and a deep delight.

Löwenmensch: The Lion Man

A Cyberacoustic Deep-Time Sojourn

Listen & Watch on All Major Streaming Platforms

(including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram)

Performed by Michael Garfield for inclusion in an archaeological research project by Liane Gabora and Mike Steel about cross-domain knowledge transfer (how people translate a 40,000-year-old sculpture made in mammoth ivory into modern electronic media). 

The associated video is the best-yet showcase of my "cyberguitar" technique, using the acoustic guitar and hardware pedalboards in a kind of home-brewed modular digital synthesis to dream up a full electroacoustic orchestra with minimal equipment. You can read more about it at Guitar Moderne.

New Essays & Talks on Psychedelic Futurism

Read Here

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds.

Read & Watch Here

Ignite Talks are five-minute lightning presentations with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s a fun and challenging format, and my invitation to present one for The Long Now Foundation seemed like a perfect opportunity to distill my thinking on a complex and difficult topic: the rise of AI-assisted forgeries and their social implications.

Listen Anywhere You Go For Podcasts

This week I chat with artist Stephanie Lepp, producer of Infinite Lunchbox, the Reckonings podcast, and — most excitingly, for me — Deep Reckonings, a stunning new project exploring the “pro-social” uses of AI-generated “deepfakes” and other synthetic media for education, therapy, and other beneficial outcomes. In this discussion, we explore how deepfakes can expand and enrich the potent benefits of earlier media like theater and the novel; why it’s so controversial to portray wrongdoers finally accepting accountability and moral leadership, even when it’s an explicit fiction; and how science itself is going to have to change to accommodate a more nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of truth.

Listen Anywhere You Go For Podcasts

This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes — including how synthetic media will turn the logic of waking life from something sober and tangible to something more like a dream or shamanic journey; and the ethical concerns they had to consider and enact in producing something intended to create good but capable of accidentally causing serious harm.

Episode & Show Notes Here

I sit down for a real barnstormer with host Sam Barton to discuss:

• Coronavirus and the epistemic crisis;
• Community and fragmentation;
• Evolution as a multi-billion year remix project;
• Psychedelics as training wheels for transhumanism;
• Restoring democracy, and regenerative communities;
• Rewilding the future; and
• The power of ideas.

Watch on YouTube | Watch on Facebook

"Deepfakes, sensemaking crisis, information warfare, surveillance capitalism, augmented reality - much to talk about! The Plutopia team speaks with our guest Michael Garfield, Community Manager for @longnow and host of the Future Fossils podcast. We'll work on better distribution of the future!"

Vote for My Designs!
South West Science Writers' Association Logo Contest

Vote Here

Vote for me in the Southwest Science Writers Association (SWSWA) Logo Contest! I cherish every opportunity to return to my roots as a scientific illustrator and while the (international) competition is fierce, you can vote as many times as you want. So please do vote more than once, and share this post.

Thank You Burning Man
for Including Future Fossils in Your Official Newsletter!

Check It Out Here

Cutting Through: Now with an Even Longer Now & More Creative Service

No point in pretending otherwise: these are dark times. So I hope the treasures that I have to share with you help carve a bright, warm haven in the fear and loathing, and restore a sense of peace and beauty to this otherwise benighted Autumn.

NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR EP

Let's start with some music: twelve minutes of guitar that an executive at my all-time favorite label told me was "a perfect soundtrack for an autumn morning."

Mudras, my new EP of solo fingerstyle guitar tunes, is now live on major streaming platforms. Reviews have been entirely positive; one of my friends, a fabulous guitarist, told me that it made him cry. Maybe 12-minutes of your attention doesn't make even free music exactly "free", but I hope it's the kind of listening that benefits you:

Listen to Mudras EP

I'm also hard at work on The Age of Reunion, the insanely ambitious singer-songwriter album I've been teasing on this blog for over a decade. It's now halfway done (!) and the latest finished track, "You Don't Have To Move", is up on Patreon. Four other songs are up on Bandcamp, where you can listen to them all and pre-order the LP.

NEW LOOP LIBRARY

And for fellow musicians and sound artists, I just released a library of over 300 loops from some of my most inspired improvisations, recorded on tour across three years and three continents. This archive is organized into 65 tempo-matched scenes in a ready-to-jam Ableton Live set, but fans of other audio software can easily lift the WAV files as-is for use in Logic, ProTools, or whatever floats your boat:

NEW PODCAST EPISODES

I've been chipping away at a couple of paintings; you can follow their progress (as well as the drawings I've made in my daughter's first sketchbook and a colorful bouquet of other visual miscellany) on Instagram. But lately, much more of my time has been going into Future Fossils Podcast, which has become a totally reliable font of inspiring conversations with amazing people:

In episode 151 I talk with Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter, about his relationship to time, identity, and purpose, his commitment to service and the creative life, and where he thinks we are in the Big Picture amidst all the chaos and possibility of 02020.

I speak with the ultra-talented, immediately relatable, and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our extended and potentially crazy periods of constant synchronicity, and from traveling the world playing music and making art.

I talk with Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister, anarchist community organizer Naomi Most, and playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality. We cover everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city, to the unquantifiable value of culture, to the strange ontologies emerging in our screen-bound era.

An excerpt of this conversation's transcript made it up on Lucid News, one of my favorite psychedelic culture mags, as "Can Burning Man Be Replicated Virtually?" Quick and illuminating read.

NEW WRITING & ANIMATION ON "SLEEPING BEAUTIES"

My first long-form article for Long Now, "Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day," explores five new discoveries, in the fossil record and in living organisms, that interrogate the boundary between the living and the dead...

...and, poetically, at the same time I was writing that I was assigned to produce a new animation for the Santa Fe Institute about what Sidney Redner learned from his survey of 110 years of physics papers — and why some scientific discoveries (what Redner calls "sleeping beauties") take so long to get noticed:

I'll part with the friendly reminder to help keep everybody safe with proper face masks. If somehow you've made it all the way to Autumn 02020 without one of these — or you just want to level up your style — check out the four designs I have up at Idea Fab Labs. You can select from head straps (which I like) or ear loops (if that's more your kind of thing) and each contains a pocket for a fancy filter, if you want to take your safety measures all the way: