Making Sense of the Pandemic • Free Coloring Book • New Music & Paintings

"The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.” 

– Lewis Thomas

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems, and Creative Opportunity

While in enforced isolation due to a plague, college student Isaac Newton devised our modern theories of both optics and gravity. What will YOU do with your social distancing?

This opportunity for a new creative chapter is upon us at all levels, right now. Our national and global systems were stuck on suboptimal solutions and have demonstrated their inability to handle the complex and evolving crises of our emerging planetary culture. We now have a chance to break out, dream up local answers in massive parallel, and come back together in a stronger, more resilient (and antifragile) place than where we started.

Here's a short audio essay on how to make sense of this in light of complex systems research, with dozens of links to useful information in the show notes. Hope it helps.

For those of you with a sudden surplus of free time, I've decided to freeware the previously patrons-only Future Fossils Coloring Book for your enjoyment. It's a 25-page PDF of trippy doodles (some abstract, some of a natural history persuasion) that you can print out or color on a tablet. My only request is that I get to see some of the finished results!

If you want the "full experience," here are hours and hours of free music for your streaming pleasure, with a confirmed track record of facilitating awesome art sessions:

Spotify • Bandcamp • Soundcloud (fewer tracks there compared to the other two)

And now onto some new art!

I painted the top two pieces in collaboration with Jamie Baldwin Gaviola (@flowstatepaint on Instagram). She started the top two and mailed them to me to finish, and then I had a wild hair to "breed" the two paintings. My daughter had her first birthday this week and in the weeks leading up, the two paintings Jamie started seemed reminiscent to me of my partner (the softer pastel sunburst grid one) and myself (the edgier and bolder peacock circuitboard one). The third painting, the square of blobby motion and expressive dynamic gooeyness in the middle, is unquestionably our child.

But of course no symbol can be contained by a single interpretation, even for one (honest) person, and as with all artwork, new layers and associations will undoubtedly reveal themselves over time.  The "daughter" painting was finished the night I also completed a new studio arrangement of a song I've been kind of "pregnant" with for the last several years, a song that first started taking shape the week my partner moved to Austin to live with me in 2014 and I got lost in the Texas Hill Country on ayahuasca (but that's another story). That song, "Always Catching Up," has a lot to do with the network latencies in our nervous systems and how we're always responding to a state of the world that has already transformed into something else. 

When I first played the scratch mix of the studio track for my friends in Santa Fe, the only visible star turned out to be Aldebaran, which is associated with the Archangel Michael and with militant peacocking. It seemed like I was being drawn back into the synchronicity vortex that subsumed me for over a month in 2017 leading up to the release of the Pavo LP & Martian Arts EP (I talk a little bit about that particular Chapel Perilous in the public liner notes to those two releases). Anyway, the latest canvas finished itself that night, and now here we are.

All three of these paintings are available for sale, or if you're playing it safe with your money still want a copy, they're available as cardstock and canvas prints in my shop (Jamie and I split proceeds).

Peacock Circuitboard: Prints & Original

Sunrise Grid: Prints & Original

Aldebaran: Prints & Original

Rock Out! New Art & Merch, Music for MDMA Therapy, and Robot Love

It's almost April!  Subscribe to me on Patreon before this Sunday and you're on the list to get my first psychedelic coloring book PDF when it comes out next week.  You'll also get 27 other patrons-only posts, early and exclusive episodes of Future Fossils Podcast, my uncut (deeply psychedelic) interview with Visionary Art Australia, and an increasing share of the time I used to spend on Facebook, shouting into an abyss.

If, like me, you're kind of underwater with your money right now – I still hope that I can welcome you into some awesome conversations that inspire and enlighten.  If you are still using Facebook, join the Future Fossils Facebook group – there are 1100 of us in there sharing links about the future, awesome art, amazing science, deep thoughts, and hilarious asides.  It's where I share most of the cool news that I find, these days...

Thank you so much for staying with me as we grow and change.  And now on to the show!

Rock Out!  (Fighting Rooster)

18"x24" – 2018 – paint pens on canvas

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printed items (iPhone cases, stickers, tapestries, etc.)

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A memorial from 2018 (Year of the Earth Dog in the Chinese calendar) looking back on 2017 (Year of the Fire Rooster) and last year's massive rooster painting, this piece sums up how it feels to me like creativity and raw belligerence so often go together – passion, fire, spirit, drive – to make is to destroy what was. Sometimes you just can't tell the difference between a fight and making love...

HD downloads now on Bandcamp

Also available for streaming on:

Spotify • Apple Music • Amazon • Google Play

Last month I played a benefit for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) at the home of Aubrey Marcus to help raise funds for the Phase 3 FDA-approved clinical trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

These new clinical protocols are the most successful PTSD intervention known to science, more than four times as effective as antidepressants, and they don't require a lifetime of medication. These are CURES, not treatments.  And in our anxious age of overstimulation and emotional bombardment, this is more necessary than it's ever been.

I'm honored to have music in the therapeutic playlists for these trials, thanks to the endorsement of my friend and MAPS clinician Saj Razvi.  I'm also working on MAPS to release these playlists to the public. But for now, here is an half-hour excerpt from the instrumental set I played last month...

Enjoy, and let me know if any of this makes it into your own therapeutic playlists!

This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, and author of twenty-six books.  We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess…

This week we chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications, a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. Chances are good you’ve seen the “Don’t Date Robots!” public service announcement from the cartoon Futurama, and probably Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” music video. Maybe you’ve seen Heror Ex Machina or Spielberg’s AI. And let’s not forget the Femmebots in Austin Powers. But does any of this media, for or against, paint a realistic portrait of the impact of machines on human intimacy?

That's 50% OR MORE off any of the pieces you see here.  I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from live painting, so the picking's only getting slimmer...but I'm happy to take far less than the asking price if something speaks to you.  Check out the pieces I have left here, then just send an email with an offer, and I'll let you know within a day.

And last, here are a couple things I'm doing soon that you might like to know about:

Thanks again for reading and have a most blessed couple weeks!

“I think it is misplaced to argue for doing fundamental research just because of its technological spinoffs. Our current standard of living vitally depends on the curiosity-driven research that was done a generation or two before…the most important things that we know fifty years from now will be things we have no idea about right now.” 

– Lawrence Krauss

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

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

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

New Videos

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

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

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

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

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

New Podcast

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

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

New Music & Talk from COSM

Stream or Download it here.  

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

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

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

Stream or Download here.

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

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

New Merch

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

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

love

Michael

Happy New Year! It's An Art Explosion: John Speaker Collab // Free Ableton Live Pack // Future Fossils Episode 13 // Synchronicity & The Inner Eye

“We try to be conscious and respectful of our neighbors…and yet, we MUST prevail.”

– Alex Grey

Greetings, friends, and Happy New Year!  According to the Chinese Calendar, 2017 will be the Year of the Fire Rooster.  Given my love for sacred flames and bird-related things, I'm already gearing up for a year that feels like home:  wild independence, visionary ventures, channeled positive aggression, yang creative push to new horizons, yes let's do this!

Making room for new beginnings also means the end of some things I've held dear.  Tonight is the last Loopers' Night (the music monthly residency that I've hosted here for years).  I'm painting much less live work now, and more at home (where I can join you guys for webcast art jams, like next Friday's).

Fewer public appearances in general means more time to work on my book, album, and podcast – all part of an ecosystem of ideas and art I'm making this year to help people navigate our increasingly psychedelic century.  If you'd like privileged access to my new work and the satisfaction of supporting independent art, please check this out:

And now here are the new things.  Enjoy, and Happy New Year...!

New Collaboration with John Speaker

18"x24" // acrylic // canvas // sold

Buy 11"x17" prints

A collaboration with John Speaker, to whom I mailed this painting halfway through.  He took a piece that led to a dead end for me, and lifted it to new heights. (We've never met in person.)  Check out our as-yet-unclaimed other collaboration by mail here.

Free Ableton Live Pack

Download this Live Pack

I've been making music with the amazing digital audio workstation Ableton Live since I got my first Macbook in 2004...but I've mostly kept it to myself. As I embark on the adventure of recording and publishing my first studio album in nearly a decade, I'd like to share with you some of the tools and toys I'm making for this project. So here is my way overdue first Live Pack, containing two drum racks I'm using for sample-based electronic percussion on the new album.

Both of these drum racks are based on a single-take sample recorded through a Beyerdynamic M88-TG microphone, a hypercardioid condenser mic renowned for its excellent flat EQ response and full-spectrum sound. Both slice one sample into sixteen short clips to be triggered as percussion hits (in my case with a Keith McMillen QuNeo MIDI controller – but you could use just about anything that will send pressure-sensitive commands).

Plenty more sample-based synthesizers and drum kits to come. My hope is that you have fun with these – and that you share whatever music they inspire!

(If you would like to learn the basics of music production and performance with Ableton Live, I'm happy to get you started with lessons over video chat. I'm eager to share more technical knowledge in the years to come, and share the joy of making music/paintings/writing/podcasts/anything I do...)

New Episode of Future Fossils with Rupert "Dr. Chill" Till

“I keep saying to people, this is work. I’m not here on holiday…I’m here disseminating the results from a 3.5 Million Pound European research project.”

– Dr. Chill

Our thirteenth episode features Dr. Rupert Till, aka Dr. Chill, the world’s first PhD in Electronic Chillout Music. Dr. Chill has a habit of reconstructing ancient acoustic spaces from caves and temples, then writing electronic chill out music with 3D printed replicas of the world’s oldest instruments. In other words, he’s a badass at the intersection of academic archeology and international dance festival culture. A pretty great place to be!

We had an amazing conversation about his research, rites of passage, and the perennial trance dance that defines us as human beings at Boom Festival.

Subscribe to, Rate, and Review Future Fossils Podcast on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.

(Or download the episode and read show notes here.)

Guest on Synchronicity Podcast

I had a wonderful time on the Synchronicity Podcast, discussing "the usual": psychedelics, shadow work, nonduality...dinosaurs...we really went for it with this one.

Give it a listen here.

Guest on The Inner Eye Podcast

The Inner Eye podcast is a collection of spontaneous and casual conversations with visionary artist Jake Kobrin exploring the subjects of art and creativity as well as things of relevance to navigating our existence such as religion and spirituality and psychedelics.  

Listen to our episode here.

Upcoming Awesomeness

The FINAL Loopers' Night is this Thursday.  For the last two years, my cohost cellist Jen Mulhern and I have led groups of daring instrumentalists through alternately groovy and hypnotic electronic live improvisations.  Every month we welcomed new musicians into the adventure.  This month Jen and I move on to dedicate ourselves to other projects, but we're going out in style...

RSVP and learn about participating acts here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sneak Peek: New Dinosaur Painting

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

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

Hummingbird Blankets Available to Order!

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

Coming Down from CoSM

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

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

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

Live Looping Guitar Pedalboard Teardown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the First Few Sections of my Coming Book

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

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

My Talk from Sonic Bloom 2016

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

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

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

And, Lastly:

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

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

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

- Abraham Simpson

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

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

– Alex Grey

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

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

So I'm Teaching A Workshop at COSM!

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

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

How To Live in the Future (Part 2)

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

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

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

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

Future Fossils S1:E10
with Anthony Thogmartin & David Krantz

Subscribe to us on iTunes // Episode Permalink

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

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

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

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

Article on Group Looping at LoopingLive.com

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

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

19 November Gig in New York City

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

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

RSVP & Tickets Here.

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

– Martha Graham

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

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

– Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

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

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

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

360º Photos from Portugal & Boom Festival 

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

Here they are:

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

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

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

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

Future Fossils Podcast FINALLY on iTunes & Stitcher!

Subscribe/Rate/Review on iTunes

Subscribe/Rate/Review on Stitcher

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

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

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

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

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

Download this album on Bandcamp

Stream this album on Spotify

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

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

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

"How To Live in the Future" at Metapsychosis Journal

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

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

Read the whole piece here.

New Third Eye Drops Podcast with Erik Davis

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

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

Unreleased Album as Perk for Ayahuasca Reader Campaign

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

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

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

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

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