A Manifesto For Live Art | The Evolution of Surveillance | New Tunes From Black Rock City | Indiegogo Campaign Update

It's time to get real with you all.

Landing from another three month tour's been really difficult.  There's no use in hiding that the life I've chosen is full of its own unique hardships – like financial insecurity, endless car repairs, and coming home to new property managers changing everything about the one "stable" place I know.  I can talk about change all I like, but like most people I struggle to embody it.

I've loved dedicating my blood, sweat, and tears to festival culture for the last six years but I have to wonder what more I could be doing with my life.  There must be some way to make a bigger impact in the world, to serve more people with my gifts.

This blog goes out to 7,000 people, now.  I want to hear from you and learn what I can do to make my presence in your life more meaningful, inspiring, and useful than it is.  What could I be doing better?  How can I repay you for your time and your support?  Let me know.

...And while you're pondering that, I'll just keep doing what I love.  Here are two of my finest essays yet; a fierce new free live EP from Burning Man; and some fun new merchandise for supporters of my Indiegogo campaign:

Painting While Dancing: A Manifesto For Live Art

It takes a special kind of person to be a live painter. It’s one of these emergent 21st Century art forms that remix performer and audience – exposing the mystique of the artist and inviting everyone else into the party. Most of us are used to – maybe even tired of – explaining what we’re doing to unfamiliar fans and promoters. Being an artist is weird enough; but being a live painter requires a person to actually thrive on the combination of fear and wonder that people inevitably bring to encounters with the strange.  (Read more.)

New Merch For Supporters of my Indiegogo Campaign!

This campaign is about so, so much more than shiny new stuff – that's all just there to subsidize the deeper and more meaningful work I'm doing to start meaningful conversations about our rapidly-changing world.

I made an event page for my work as a Google Glass Explorer where I've been sharing tons of news and articles about the questions of Big Data, health issues, and general anxiety about the future raised by advanced technologies like Glass.  Definitely check it out.

And last week I hosted a public chat on Tawkers, a really cool site for social discourse, about all of this.  You can read the archived conversation here:  "Art & Spirit in The Age of Surveillance."

On that note...I promised all of you a new essay series combining my twin passions for the past and future, and here it is – part one of my paleontology/transhumanism remix:

The Evolution of Surveillance: Burgess Shale to Google Glass

New dimensions unfurled and into them grew an exponential burst of minds and bodies, urged by necessity into new games of sight. Endowed with the radical new ability to detect at a distance, the naïve ecologies of Earth accelerated into unprecedented combinations of locomotive swimming chasers and chased. Simple musculatures adapted to navigate new axes, to maneuver. Surveillance – literally, "to watch from above" – was born...and animals like Anomalocaris were the black helicopters of the prehistoric ocean.  (Read more.)

Free Download: Earth Song For Sky Dance [EP]

This year marks my second stint as the official music for Center Camp Café's aerial fabric dance showcase at Burning Man.  (Here are two videos from 2011.)  They get up there on aerial silks and dazzle a captive audience; I hang out on the ground and improvise a live electronic soundtrack to their movement on guitar and effects.  Earth Song For Sky Dance.

Think Boards of Canada meets instrumental Nine Inch Nails.  Can you hear the dust in my pedals?  :)

This is just the first of several performances I'll release for free this fall.  Something happened to me this summer and I feel like my live sets are suddenly much groovier, more textured, and passionate.  I'm opening new portals with this whole cyberguitar thing, and really look forward to sharing the best of my shows from Gratifly, Rootwire, Fractal Planet, and Scoot Inn with you all soon.  In the meantime, enjoy this one...it's a quickie but I like it.

Guitar Looping & Aerial Dance at Burning Man 2013

I recorded video through Glass while playing, so you can get a sense for how dizzying it is to try and operate a guitar, all of those pedals, and keep an eye on my collaborators while I'm playing.  Apologies in advance for the vertigo.

Playing & Speaking at Art Outside 2013

This is my favorite festival of fall, each year, and one of the highest artist/guest ratios of any of them year-round.  I'll be performing on the spectacularly beautiful laser-cut Folk It Up stage late night on Saturday and giving a talk on "Entertainment as Social Action" in the Pavilion on Saturday afternoon, as well as making an increasingly-rare live painting appearance with Third Coast Visions, the art collective my friends and I started here in Texas.  

This year's lineup is populated with many of my favorite local, regional, national, and international acts and the grounds themselves will be a magical wonderland of creativity, so I hope to see you there.

Parting Thought:  Separated at Birth?

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My Creation Skateboard Is Here! | Burning Man Through Google Glass | Rootwire Mural Video | New Live Painting

"As consciousness expands, so does the risk of insanity."
– John Horgan

"Our idea of unity and our way of solving conflicts is simply to eliminate one of the two parties...But this is the habitual dualist's solution to the problem of dualism:  to solve the dilemma by chopping off one of the horns."
– Alan Watts

My Creation Skateboards deck is finally here!

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Before I say another word, let me simply revel with you in a moment of modest success:  back in January over 1300 friends, family, and total strangers voted my design to victory in the international Creation Skateboards DIY Contest.  Thank you guys so much!  I just got word from the company that the boards are on their way – and not a moment too soon, because I'm broke as a joke after summer tour and needed another kickass perk for my indiegogo campaign to help support me while I pursue my Greater Calling as writer of provocative, futuristic meta-disciplinary ecodelia.  

So please:  buy this skateboard by contributing to my campaign.  You're helping me dedicate more time to sharing my words and insights with the world, and less time to hustling art.

Here's what's been on my mind, of late:

Someone whose opinion I greatly respect just pointed out to me that my posts about Google Glass sound like unequivocally positive fanboy raving - "breathless like a nun in adoration" - and so I want to be totally clear about how conflicted and ambivalent I am about all of this. It's important you guys know where I'm coming from, and that I'm not just gleefully strolling into Borgdom. In fact, the only reason I took on this opportunity as a beta tester is because the whole thing scares me silly.

I'm terrified by the knowledge that the people in power today think human beings can be reduced to data and reprogrammed...by the thought that I may not even recognize my children as human, or the world they grow up in as one in which we can survive. That we will be so caught up in the "bread and circus" of our Brave New World that won't even remember what we've lost.

But fearing the technological future feels to me like a symptom of the same dissociation that got us into this mess in the first place: the idea that we are separate from the automatic, unconscious realm of nature and the body, that we are one thing and the planet is another.

That is exactly why I agreed to become a Glass Explorer – to face these fears, to better understand them, to find what peace I can in my heart torn between enthusiasm for a world of unimagined possibilities and grief for a world crushed underfoot by machines. Demons are angels denied, hell is heaven resisted. I feel the urging of a greater Self and I'd rather help it come alive in love than fear.

Kevin Kelly inspired me with the thesis of his book What Technology Wants that we take a more deliberate, discerning approach to technological adoption. That we not simply rush in aroused by the thrill of novelty. That we treat our technologies (both machines and ideas) as our children - acknowledging that they have a life of their own, and we can only do our best to rear them lovingly.

What some might call giving myself to Google in human sacrifice, I call choosing to love a problem child, in the hope that taking the third path between the past-loathing uncritical techno-optimist and future-loathing neo-luddite reactionary will lead us into a world where the Made can get along with the Born.

If I'm a sacrifice, it's in the service of trying to teach people how to relate to technology with caution, care, sensitivity, and discernment. I think the vast majority of my fellow Glass Explorers are just cracked out on a Future High and walking into an open manhole. All the more reason to try and be a loud, exemplary exception to the rule. Figure out what good things can be done with this, and how to think about it in a healthy way.

The knights of old wielded double-edged swords. They were trusted to do so. Just because something could hurt you doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. (In fact, "If guns are outlawed...") So yeah, I'm an enthusiast. A reluctant enthusiast. I want to do my small part to steer this in the right direction.

"The good news is that the increase in entropy of the civilization we're experiencing is, in a sense, feeding the whole new information of a planetary culture. It's precisely the chaos of an industrial society that is creating the passion to create alternatives, so that the entropy or noise is creating the possibilities for innovation and music."

–William Irwin Thompson

This is a conversation.  Feel free to weigh in on Facebook or Indiegogo, or email me personally.  I'll find a way to answer you in the essays I'm writing about this over the next several months.  Your feedback is invaluable to me.

In the meantime, below are the some of the videos I've taken through Glass at Burning Man & Rootwire:

Message To Your Future Self, Part Three

Daniel Pinchbeck on Surveillance & Transparency

The Cathedral of Celestial Mathgic Through Glass

Rootwire Collaboration Mural Through Glass

The Arrest

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Dedicated to everyone violated by the prison industrial complex for a nonviolent crime.  I wanted to do a painting that disturbed me, that was visceral and unsettling.  That felt violating.  (And, I wanted to ape the style of my homie and fellow live painter Andy Reed.)  I don't know if I pulled it off...looking at it now, all I can think is "space bacon."  Which in some weird way, I guess, is appropriate.  :P

Painted live at

Ecstatic Saturdays (Dallas, TX) 2013 04 13 - Bliss Goddess

The Upper Decks (ATX) 2013 04 19 - Sun Salutation

The Parish (ATX) 2013 04 27 - A Live One, Papadosio

The Granada Theater (Lawrence, KS) 2013 05 01 - Papadosio

Californos (KCMO) 2013 06 29 - Luminaries, Miss Conception, Wstndgrl

The Parish (ATX) 2013 07 04 - Psymbionic, Gladkill, Andreilien (Heyoka)

The Parish (ATX) 2013 07 05 - Mountain Standard Time, Earphunk

12th & Porter (Nashville) 2013 07 21 - Gates

Click for a closer look at the process:

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That's all for now, folks.  I know it's a lot.  I'm being way too productive these days.  Thanks for sticking with it!  Love and gratitude...

New Painting, Music, & Enamel Pins | Message To Your Future Self | Burning Man Schedule

"Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery."

– Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play (p10)

"From the evidence...it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive."

– Emily Esfahani Smith

I'm leaving today for Burning Man (schedule below) and will spend the next week collecting interviews and other inspirational content to share with you all...in the meantime, my tireless sharing includes:

• My live painting from Gratifly Music & Arts Festival,

• My deepest, jazziest album of cyberacoustic guitar music to date;

• A new series of crowd-sourced inspirational videos taken through Google Glass;

...as well as some very shiny enamel pins!  I think that's already more than I should try and lay on you at once, but I've always been better at making art than hustling it.  Enjoy, and have a magnificent week!

"Message To Your Future Self" Video Series

I think it's very important to have a conversation about what role Glass (and other vastly more powerful technologies just around the bend) can play in our lives - how to wield these double-edged swords constructively, how to bring the new world into being in ways that maximize its promise and minimize its peril.   I really want us to have a thoughtful conversation about this and welcome your thoughts and feedback by email or publicly on this facebook event page.

My first idea for using Glass to empower and uplift people was to take 10-second videos of everyone who wanted to share their message with the world:

Part 1: Gratifly & Unitus Festivals

Watch in HD on Youtube

Part 2: Rootwire Festival

Watch in HD on Youtube

In the last six years I have given almost all of my work away for free to people out of faith that the most important thing is to help people find meaning and purpose in their lives, not set a price on the value of my time. So please take a moment to check out what I'm doing with Glass and make a contribution to my fundraising campaign if you can.

My New Enamel Pin Collection

Buy the whole set for $50 + s/h or individually: Triceratops | Butterfly | Dragon

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Thanks to The Headspace for their help making this happen!  A little about each design:

"As Awesome As Three Unicorns" (the dinosaur) – Painted at Sonic Bloom in 2012, this piece bridges my two lives as a scientific illustrator and live artist, and ended up in the collection of Mary Jane, the youngest live painter ever, who is also totally awesome. 

"Every Day Is A New Year" (the dragon) – Painted at Rootwire and Art Outside Festivals as well as innumerable other small shows, this piece was my anticipatory portrait of 2013, an homage to the late Terence McKenna, and led to my being selected by Google for their Glass Explorer Program.

"Takes Flight" (the butterfly) – Painted at the MAPS 2010 Psychedelic Science Conference, this piece was inspired by a vision I received in a workshop with Alex & Allyson Grey the day before the event.

A New Album of Oceanic Cyber-Guitar Grooves

Stream/Download it here

Grab "Dance on the Roof" for free on Soundcloud

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I'm rebranding my work as an electroacoustic improvisational instrumentalist to reflect the inherent contradictions in making electronic music on an acoustic guitar – and to tap into the potent relationship I've developed with owl medicine since moving to Austin two years ago.  Here's a little bit about this release and the work to come:

If Michael Garfield can be said to collect anything, it would be great gigs in strange venues – from The Cave Without A Name to the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference, from Black Rock Desert to all four stages in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. 

Possessed by a passion for the feeling of spaces and determined to translate "vibe" into sound, Michael's increasingly all-improvised acoustic-electronic sets wed house concert intimacy with ravetastic cyberdelia in magical performances that draw down the spirit of a place into music. 

Capturing both past and future in alchemical alloys where fingerpicking and hardware live PA join in soaring transcendental freestyles, this is music as adventurous as the stages on which it's performed. Half Zen calligrapher and half starship captain, Michael Garfield is building a cathedral of sound for our paradoxical Age of Transition. 

Album artwork by Bonnie Goodson.

New Live Painting From Gratifly Festival

Splash!

11" x 17" Prints For Sale Here

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24"x36" - paint markers on masonite

Original available - email me to inquire/offer

Painted live at Gratifly Music and Arts Festival to the music of:
Thriftworks, Gaudi, Papadosio, Kalya Scintilla, The Werks,
Eskmo, Govinda, Desert Dwellers, Akara DJ, Ployd

My Burning Man Schedule

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• Tuesday ("Monday Night"): Center Camp Café

12:45 - 1:30 am: Cyberacoustic Guitar Improv

• Wednesday: Center Camp Café

4:00 - 5:00 pm: "These are the Good Old Days: Reverse Nostalgia from a Citizen of the Future" (talk)

5:30 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar for the Aerial Dance Showcase

• Thursday: Fractal Planet Speaker Series

2:30 - 3:45 pm: Taking A Cosmic Perspective (talk)

7:30 - 8:15 pm: Musical Break - Cyberacoustic Guitar 

• Friday: Palenque Norte Speaker Series

2:00 - 3:00 pm: "The Age of Aquarius & The End of the Cargo Cult" (talk)

• Saturday: Sacred Spaces Village

5:00 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar in the Grand Hall 

Crowdfunding my Google Glass | Reflections on a Shift | New SCI Pin | New GRC Flatbill

NOTE:  If you subscribe to this blog by GMail, please note that they just changed their settings and even though you signed up for it, you are likely to miss future updates from me unless you drag this email from the "promotional" to "primary" folder in their new tab format.  (Sheesh.)

"Art is the opposite of war. Artists wage peace with their creations."

– Alex Grey

"When everyone realizes they are an artist, we will have world peace."

– Roman Villagrana

The big news continues.  Here's the best of what I've been up to for the last few weeks:

Help Support My Google Glass Video & Essay Series!

Google selected me on the basis of this tweet to be one of the first 2000 people with access to their game-changing new smart glasses, which allow me to share my work more fluidly than ever before.  Even though the opportunity is kind of overwhelming, I feel a profound responsibility to take it up so that I can continue my work to inspire and empower as many people as possible by making my life a work of art.

My plan for Glass is to share as much as I can about my own creative process and the amazing community of artists with whom I work through a video record of my transformational festival tour and an ongoing video time capsule project for people to leave messages to their future selves.  You'll be funding an ongoing series of intimate views into the work I do as an acoustic-electronic musician, live painter, public speaker, writer, and awestruck traveler – with plenty of windows into the work of other artists, inventors, and inspiring people.

I am also going to write a series of short essays on the promise and risk inherent in this new technology, and others like it.  It's a Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory...but most of those kids got eaten by machines.  It's a Lightsaber...but with great power comes great responsibility.  Hopefully these writings will help a generation of digital natives navigate their world with more care, discernment, wonder, and respect.

Please support this project however you can – in small ways or large – by donating to this campaign and sharing it with your friends, family, and anyone who is interested to see what Glass can do to empower someone in service to the creative commons and the evolution of our planet.

Here are pics of the brass pin and vinyl stickers I'm offering as perks:

The World's First POV Video Projection Onto Stage! (?)

Watch in HD

Huge thanks to Morphis Art for taking these four short videos of my set at Gratifly Festival, where I streamed live video from my face back onto the stage, where members of the audience could see themselves up there with me – as well as the fire dancers and live flower arrangement by the legendary Anthony Ward – and get an up-close look at what I'm doing with all of those guitar pedals.

My talk from Om Vibrations 2013: Reflections on a Shift

Free Download Here

New Live Album: This Never Happened

Stream for free on Bandcamp

For real, guys.  I don't know what you're talking about.  ;)  But Magnetic Eye Records does.  They made this album #007 in their catalog; given all the spy talk surrounding my appointment as a Glass Explorer, I'm tickled.

Official SCI Hornings Hideout Pin [Sold Out]

After years of flirting with The String Cheese Incident to make some official merchandise for them, I was approached by Sales & Shenanigans to make this pin for their Hornings Hideout shows this year.  The limited series of 220 sold out in ten minutes.  D'oh!  We should have made more.  I suspect we will be working together again soon...

The New MG x Herbivore Designs x GRC Flatbill

The SE Festival Tour Continues

Michael Goes To Burning Man, Part Five

This time as a Glass Explorer.  A big part of the work I'm hoping you'll support with my Indiegogo campaign is to get out there to record as much awesome and inspiring work as possible – both my own and other people's. My full Burning Man speaking and music schedule is here (on the left sidebar).

Speaker Series Lineup on FB

Fractal Planet is also taking a quantum leap and powering their camp with a RevAir vertical mag-lev wind turbine – clean, quiet energy that will turn the desert winds into the electrical life of celebration. Support their crowdfunding campaign and help usher in a new era for transformational festivals...

Palenque Norte Speaker Series Lineup on FB

You might already know as the "TED Talks for Psychedelics," but it's a lot more than that – over the years it has featured such luminaries as Alex & Allyson Grey, Alexander & Ann Shulgin, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Damer, and more.  They're running yet another donation-worthy campaign, which you can read about and donate to by clicking the pic above.

That's "all" for now!  Deep gratitude from me to you for your time and attention.  I'm always available to respond to your questions and feedback.  Stay in touch and have a beautiful weekend!