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!

Autumnal Cornucopia: The Infoboros • New Zelda Song • Carbon-Neutral NFT Future Fossils • Podcast Tour • Back at Meow Wolf Soon!

Thanks for reading! I am trying to get back more, but shorter, more digestible emails...but that means catching up first with a major info-dump. (It's my love language!) Hope your upgrades have been and continue to be mostly pleasant, and that you find something in here that hits the spot. Write back any time...

New Book Cover & Future Fossils NFT Collection

The brilliant Vidur Mishra, gifted undergraduate student of my mentor Richard Doyle, just wrote his first book and it is one hell of a debut. The Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information blends neuroscience, yoga and meditation, and information theory together into a mind-altering ride on the nature of consciousness and what to notice about it.

I feel very lucky to have done the cover for this book. The commission sparked my passion for photomanipulation art, and got me deep in some awesome apps that have become my go-to flowstate protocols when it's too late at night for me to mess with paint or music. And of course, the honor of doing the cover for a book this good...

It's also my first NFT (non-fungible token, a unique digital instance of a work of art, minted on a blockchain) at the carbon-neutral digital art marketplace Voice.com, which I've been following with interest since 2018, well before it launched. I like that they want to make it as easy as can be for artists to produce collections and for people unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies to collect art without having to understand the infrastructure.

And making 1-of-1 "official" versions of each work, in addition to paper and canvas prints, makes me feel like I can recognize my finished products as unique, like paintings, even though the art is easy to mechanically reproduce (although it's worth noting that my NFTs use JPGs orders of magnitude more detailed than what anyone will find online...and that the real utility of NFTs has less to do with owning an art file and more to do with what else having a verifiable on-chain identity opens up — for instance, I can send new works to people who've acquired older ones, or grant them special access to decentralized communities or projects...I'll be writing more about this soon).

Here is more info on the book:

And here is where you'll find the NFT for this piece, and paper or canvas prints.

(I was pleased to learn that Voice promoted my work and this piece in a recent sponsored feature at Gothamist, a New York culture mag with nearly 1M Twitter followers...)

Also on Voice: FINALLY, the series of digital portals I've been diving into, rendered as unique digital collectibles with psychedelic scifi microfictions for each piece (which you can read there). I've always imagined "Future Fossils" as literal objects, time traveling messages from the future, kind of like reverse time capsules. Having, finally, the right place to enact this concept in a series, I'm reveling in the trippy glimpses of "the" future that each one invokes for me, and captioning them in that way...

I'm doing prints for these as well — but nonthelesss believe displaying the 9K-pixel-wide NFT version on a huge solar-powered OLED screen would be impressive.

Find the NFTs and read the microfictions here.

New Song About The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

And then there's this. Sometimes a song just overtakes me and writes itself in minutes. This is one of those. I love it and the people whom I've shown this demo take have ROFLed. Patreon supporters can expect more stuff like this — I'm writing music far, far faster than I can produce definitive recordings, and it seems to me that the best way to honor my undying songbird muse is to just slap these out as rapidly as possible, and loop back when I can. If that sounds fun to you, hop on board and let's do this:

New Podcast Episodes

This show has been quite satisfying for me, lately, as a host. The quality of conversation — the amount of heart and presence, the grace with which we engage in deep stuff with well-balanced levity — has been nourishing.  The latest two are no exceptions:

The Future Fossils Book Club Is Back!

As of this week, all three authors have agreed to be on the show. As always, Patreon supporters at all levels are welcome...and I will set up channels for asynchronous group discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server so we can yarn together about these both before and after the actual live calls. By all means, start reading whenever you like, but I'll be active in the channels in the order I can actually get to these books, starting with Civilized To Death, and will treat these discussions as crowd-sourced notes in preparation for the episodes.

2021 Podcast Tour

I've also been on a lot of other people's amazing podcasts lately, for which I am grateful. A very diverse set of conversations spanning leadership, spiritual inquiry, creative work, sustainability, and much more. I know time is limited but let me know if you would like me to refer you to just one of them in address to a given living question in your heart:

"For episode 33, Layman [Pascal] is joined by Michael Garfield for a stroll along the highlands of weirdness. Ostensibly orbiting Michael's Complexity and Future Fossils podcasts, and his work for the Santa Fe Institute, they riff on the four types of individuals who channel creativity into society; the difficulty of translating novel insights down in the marketplace; ontological pluralism; 'pace layers' in social and artistic transformation; UFOs; Pepe the Frog, cunnilingus, and neo-Shamanic symbology; alternative voting systems and maximizing collective intelligence; dinosaurs; transhumanism, the bicameral mind, and alien modes of consciousness; tantra; retro-causation; the hummingbird at the edge of time; and -- well, frankly, Layman finally found a guest and conversation partner that out-taxed my powers of summary .... Just hop in, strap on, and see for yourself."

"We talk on everything from free will, to the future of civilization; from incentivizing integration over innovation, to staying childlike into adulthood in order to adapt to the disruptive economy we've created. If you like deep thinking, fractal conversation, you will one-hundred-percent-love this episode. Thanks and shouts to Michael for all the insight and good humor he brought to this episode!"

I'm honored to be a grantee of this rad project Idea Market, which seeks to fix the vital problems of mass media reputation market and fact factories. This conversation with founder Mike Elias and co-host James Ellis (also of Hermitix) was extremely fun.

"Discussed: Time-space synesthesia; Corporatization of the natural; 'The incentive structures of society are misaligned with the incentives of individuals'; Scaling laws of life and society; Be open to the unknown or perish; Tokenization of everything and the inability to quantify value; 'Story is the active ingredient in epistemology'; 'The truth owes you jack'; The Century of the Self & why values are more important than incentives; 'I'll probably ruin your entire company'; the need for dissenters...

"Our conversation explored the need for generalists in a highly specialised world and interdisciplinarity, including the following questions: What is the purpose of polymaths? Why is neuroplasticity is the best antidote to uncertainty and complexity? What is the nature of the technological and evolutionary transition we are in right now? Why would we want to live in the future versus the long now?"

"We explore how humans have been evolving with technology, what happens when innovation becomes the problem, and how we can best navigate societal collapse. It's a nourishing buffet of optimistic outlooks and critical evaluations on the very real issues that we're currently facing on the world stage."

They didn't break down this episode with detailed show notes, but I remember this conversation with Taran Rosenthal and Lukas Wolf as a candid trialogue about spiritual practice and psychological inquiry. Very broad, friendly banter that ranged far but stayed close to the heart of things...

Upcoming Concert

Lastly! I'm excited to announce that two years to the day after my last pre-pandemic day, and on the same amazing stage, I'll be back at Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return to open for the awesome electroacoustic harpist Mary Lattimore! If you live nearby (meaning as far as Denver), join me on December 14th and we'll have a grand old time:

“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.”

— Glennon Doyle Melton

When Papadosio Came To Meow Wolf: New Music, Art, & Conversation From An Epic Weekend

Listen Here

2020 is feeling very black and white: revenge or compassion, hope or despair...not a lot of room in the middle as the social centrifuge picks up speed. Without wanting to come off too heavy-handed, it seems like all of us future-shocked apes find it easier to settle into an extreme instead of constantly exerting the extraordinary (non)effort it takes to remain a Buddha in this bedlam...

It feels important to acknowledge that we're organisms with metabolisms and the even most awakened person I have ever met (his brain scans show no blood flow in the brain regions associated with ego activity) said he gets a little selfish when his blood sugar is low. So take it easy on yourselves and let it be okay for all this molten transformation to congeal into a person when your energies are low.

Me, personally, I'd prefer to land on "optimism" when the music stops. My friend Mark Nelson, one of the brave souls who lived in Biosphere 2, inside a giant greenhouse growing all of their own food for two years in one of the craziest and most precarious experiments humanity has ever ventured, told me on Future Fossils Podcast optimism is a yoga. It's a practical approach that's less about what your tired brain believes is fact and more about what science shows is good for you, the animal that needs a reason to keep going. It's the difference between a mouse that keeps on swimming in the bucket and a mouse that drowns.

I'm waxing purple on all this because I've spent a lot of time in some extremely dark spots over the last decade and feel like it is time to change my tune. Still love and flex that gallows humor, but frankly, if we don't believe we'll make it through we won't. As – dork alert! – Guinan said to Riker when Picard was captured by the Borg and all seemed lost, "When a man is convinced he's going to die tomorrow, he'll probably find a way to make it happen."

The other opportunity, the one that opens into iterative branching possibility and, obviously, is more fun, is to adopt the "as if" attitude that we'll get through this — even if our weary minds can't help but trace the pattern of defeat in all we see. That's why I so believe in how some of my friends, notably Anthony Thogmartin, wield their public influence in full awareness of emotional contagion and the practicality of hope. I feel like every time I talk to Anthony he sets me straight — just through the force of his enthusiasm and his curiosity and passion for the weird and wonderful times that we live in. It's so obvious in speaking to him that "the world" is mostly epistemic, so thoroughly inflected by our colored lenses that it's comic how we think we know what's what. And that is why I cherish every conversation that I have with him, and every opportunity I have to share his wonder with the world.

I just had Anthony on Future Fossils and think it's the best way I could have started out this year — the perfect tone to ring out in an annunciation of what I think matters and what I hope to encourage in this next ten years. I hope (ha ha) that you will find the time to listen and allow his optimism to osmose into you. Surely it's pragmatic, to invite this in and help it tune you, like it tunes me, so that when I can't maintain the Zen not-knowing, I'm at least convinced of something good.

Chin up, my friends. For real: your body steers your mind...

Listen Here

This was my opening set for Papadosio on their "Desert Dosio" mini-tour, the first time I've played a show with my beloved old friends since 2013. It was a beautiful homecoming. The venue is amazing, the sound engineer impeccable, the audience loving and attentive, and the vibes high. I got to test drive some new arrangements. Overall, my favorite live show since I got to play Boom Festival in Portugal in 2016.

These are songs about living in an accelerating and mysterious world...dealing with the transcendent opportunity, turbulence, and anxiety of our century. Some of these songs are over ten years old and are only now just finding wings. If you would like to hear their fully-realized studio versions later this year, follow me here on Bandcamp or on Patreon and I'll be happy to update you.

Because there was an unanticipated glitch in the recording for the last track that kind of ruined the second verse, I don't feel comfortable accepting money for this live album, and hope you'll enjoy it as my gift to you. Thanks for listening!

Prints & Original

Painted live at Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return to the music of Papadosio on 13 & 14 December 2019. Acrylic and oil pens on canvas (16"x20"x1.5", gallery wrapped).

I have no idea what I was thinking, other than that the music was excellent and I was set up right next to the subwoofer and five feet from the drums (reading 96 decibels on my friend's phone app), so the more-than-usually intense and gestural take on live painting was very obviously a result of my environment. Some kind of fractal psychedelic seahorse sigil.

This is what happens when after eleven years of painting at concerts you decide to finally let the music speak through the paint. When you let the energies of a band in an experimental growth spurt and a very full and intensely weird venue carry you where they may...

New Prog Folk Single "Indecision" • Live Notes from #IPFest 2019 • Upcoming Shows • New Archaeopteryx Painting • Secret Future Fossils Episodes

Happy summer, everybody!  We're well into the hot months, and insofar as life is the spontaneous formation of order for the dissipation of excess energy, I've been an actively engaged in the metabolism of our cosmos – making more art and music, I fear, than you can actually absorb.

So be it.  May this love's labor find you on a good day, when you're looking for some fresh and interesting stuff.  We seem to have less time for taking in new art and music than we did when this blog started in 2009, but I'm convinced the work just keeps on getting better, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.

In this newsletter:  new (and very different) music; new live art (both analog and digital); two Future Fossils Podcast episodes (on time loops and on driverless hotel rooms); and a secret stash of never-to-be-aired recordings.

Enjoy, and write back any time,

Michael

New Song: "Indecision"

"Mars Volta meets what Dave Matthews might hear after trying DMT? I love it."

- James Boswell (Ming Dynazty)

"Fantastic. Like a The Books track with extremely creative vocals."
- Anthony Thogmartin (Papadosio, Earthcry)

"It's like TOOL and Herbie Hancock had a baby."
- Matthew Foglia

"A great sonic achievement! Reminds me a lot of Peter Gabriel's best stuff."
- Norman "Dr. Blue" Katz

Free Download

In the moment before acting lies a void

where every future gleams, reflecting every other
every moment a uniquely blooming world.
In the space between two thoughts
where every other instant grows
expanding now into infinity
and every possibility unfurls...
How do you choose your next life?

I'm finally back in the saddle with the project I began way back in 1998: to join the Great Parade of visionary and alchemical songwriters, marrying acoustic and electric elements for tunes that gesture toward the singularity we live within in every moment.

Whatever else I do, the songs I've offered to this world in a handful of rare studio efforts (2006, 2008, 2014) are the sharpest and most polished work, the closest to my soul and sense of what is truly meaningful.

"Indecision," paintstakingly produced by my partner in crime Mitch Mignano, is the fruit of an epic co-creative pregnancy.  Read all about it on my Patreon account...

(Special thanks to Randal Roberts for the perfect cover art!)

Upcoming Concerts:

27 July – Santa Fe – Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant

28 July – Albuquerque – House Concert in Albuquerque with Seth Hoffman

8 August – Santa Fe – Tumbleroot Distillery with Josh Glenn Experiment

New Painting: "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic"

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Here is my latest painting, "Our Lady of the Late Jurassic" - a tribute to the amazing Archaeopteryx, my spirit animal and one of history's most legendary fossil creatures – painted live at Meow Wolf for my first Santa Fe gallery show at Eye on The Mountain.  (Acrylic and oil pens on 20"x20" panel.)

Read the whole story at michaelgarfieldart.com.

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival 2019

Signed Canvas & Cardstock Prints

Last year, Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Festival changed my life: this confluence of luminaries celebrating complex systems thinking and space exploration inspired me to move to Santa Fe. (Here's the free live album of my concert from last year's event.)

This year, on staff at SFI, I got to sit on stage and take live notes on a huge LED wall for some epic panels on synthetic biology, science fiction, and visionary architecture:

Check out this Google Photos album for all of the notes I took this year (both final images and time-lapse videos), plus the painting that I made on stage alongside Santa Fe's Tone Ranger:

Notes from #IPFest 2019

I highly recommend you watch the full-length videos of each discussion, with my notes unfolding in real-time behind the panelists, because those conversations rocked.  But if you aren't that curious, here's a fun 360º time-lapse of the UFO piece you can groove to in less than one minute:

Watch on YouTube

New Podcast Episodes

The latest episodes of Future Fossils cover both ends of the spectrum this show seems to span:  on one hand, Eric Wargo's brilliant take on how the future co-determines history; and on the other, Nathan Water's genius mashup of self-driving cars, technomadism, and the blockchain.

And lastly, I have finally made good on promises to drop a cornucopia of secret episodes on Patreon supporters with more than eight hours of never-to-be-aired recordings – including a totally bizarre panel discussion on the nature of time from my 2017 Australia tour, chats with a tantric instructor and a standup comic, and three other would-be episodes too weird to live, too rare to die:

Subscribe on Patreon for Secret Fossils

"If the truth is so important, then why am I in trouble for trying to find it?"
- Shane Mauss