New Tour Video, Rootwire Paintings, & Four More Hats

“Buy stout shoes, climb the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the sea shores, and the deep recesses of the earth…for in this way and in no other will you arrive at a knowledge of the nature and the properties of things.”

– Severinus 

"And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love."

– Hart Crane

In this few quiet weeks of respite between the bulk of summer festival season and my whirlwind adventure with FractalNation Village at Burning Man (our camp's last all-star fundraiser party is this Friday at Temple Nightclub in San Francisco), I've been musing on why it is I keep throwing myself into these things.  Living on the road on some fool's crusade to inspire the world is definitely not thankless work – in fact, I am deeply nourished by everyone's appreciation and heartfelt criticism – but sometimes I'm almost overwhelmed with the appeal of getting a weekly gig playing music in some hotel and just laying low.  Getting a studio somewhere and letting my car rust in the parking lot.

Then I remember the travel.  The sacred and secret openness that comes from the chronic shock of constant exposure to new places.  The incredible blessing it is to share these journeys with a global web of friends whose lives don't throw them quite so far as mine does...

Made from highway footage taken on last year's Love Without End Tour, this latest video from A Million Anniversaries is an homage to the sense of wonder that simply moving can instill in you.  Life in fast forward is a lot like death in slow motion, incidentally – as my friend David Titterington puts it, we're moving through tunnels of gates:

Watch this in HD

Download this entire album for free!

While you're listening, here's a recap of the art explosion on my end of Papadosio's Rootwire Music & Arts Festival in Logan, Ohio.  Definitely click on each painting to get a full sense of the detail:

Patience

2011 07 03 Electric Forest (Papadosio, SCI, Pretty Lights)

& 2011 08 04, 05 Rootwire Festival

(Govinda, Papadosio Live PA, Octopus Nebula, The Werks, RoeVy, Emancipator)

24"x36" – paint markers on stretched canvas

check price/availability of original – and leave your comments!

11"x17" prints – $20/1, $30/2 + $5 s/h – email me to order

Starting with the first layer of improvised (some might say channeled) script during Papadosio's set at Electric Forest Festival, this painting just drilled deeper and deeper into scaly, flowing detail until looking at it made my head twist.  Look closely and you can see the reticello pupil and doily iris; look long enough, and it might actually move.  After completing this piece I started wondering how the rest of this entity's face must look...expect richer, more intricate scapes in this style.

Symbiotes

2011 07 22 Jazzhaus (Future Shock)

& 2011 08 06, 07 Rootwire Festival

(Third Nature, Papadosio, The Malah, Damn Right, Invisible Allies, Bluetech, Kilowatts)

18"x24" – paint markers on stretched canvas

check price / availability of original – and leave your comments!

11"x17" prints – $20/1, $30/2 + $5 s/h – email me to order

Something about this one just screams microscopy to me.  Maybe it's the vaguely photosynthetic critters living in the middle of each larger object, or the way everything drifts into each other...an attempt to combine the sensation of earth, fire, air, and water in a single nonrepresentational piece.  A haiku about the elements as they combine in living systems.  Unlike Patience with its strong central locus, Symbiotes doesn't give the eye any obvious place to rest.  Angular, electrical energy leads to the same quivering vitality you get looking into a slide of pond water. 

So yeah, Rootwire was a barnstormer...amazing art, music, and presentations all around.  Huge thanks to Papadosio for inviting me back out there.  In addition to completing those paintings, giving a talk on the future of science, and jamming out a boiler of an afternoon cyber-acoustic set, I somehow found the time to tag a few people and nail out some more custom caps:

Body Art @ Rootwire Festival 2011 (and more)

For Robbie

For Nate

For Jason & Emma

I have some exciting updates aging in an sherry cask for next week's newsletter...in the meantime, here's an in-depth interview I gave to international design collective Arts Projekt a while back.  They ask me how my training as a scientific illustrator informs my live art; about the evolutionary themes I'm expressing through my work; and about my five year plan (hint: solar-flare induced telepathy).

Many thanks for your continued interest and support.  Have a wonderful day!

New Video: "Spokes" (Live At The B Side)

> Music
Here's my solo acoustic tapping piece "Spokes" from last week's show at The B Side Lounge in Boulder, the encore from my opening set in support of The Floozies & Fresh2Death. There's a short exposition about Bicycle Day and Albert Hofmann, to which this song is dedicated (after all, his discovery of LSD most likely saved the human species from nuclear annihilation).

Then I shred.

Spokes - 2009 11 07, The B Side Lounge, Boulder CO

(This song was originally featured on my 2008 EP Double-Edged Sword, which you can find for free or pay-what-you-want at Bandcamp.com)

The Joy Of Completion

> Imagery
Ah, the joy of circling back around to tie up loose ends. Here are two paintings I prematurely declared complete, then stared at their missing elements until I had no choice but to take them back out into the field and finish what I'd started.

2009 09 10 & 11 07 Trinumeral Festival & Boulder Farmer's Market
(Pnuma Trio, M80 Dubstation, Conspirator)
18x24 - opaque pens on masonite

available for sale (email me with an offer)
signed 11x17 prints available for $15

I circled back around to take the fractals to an additional dimension, clearing up some inconsistent fillspaces. Nothing radically different about this piece from its original iteration...just cleaner and more coherent.

2009 08 08 & 11 07 Dancin In The Streets Festival & The B Side Lounge
(Hot Buttered Rum, Steve Kimock Crazy Engine, Head For The Hills, Cornmeal & The Floozies, Fresh2Death)
18x24 - opaque pens on masonite
available for sale (email me with an offer)

Hard to tell from this picture, but the middle coil hanging from above is outlined in yellow, and the rest are outlined in gold. In "real life," the contrast makes it look as if one is incandescent and the rest are illuminated by it. I've been getting more and more into sheen-based subtleties that I can't adequately photograph...that said, I'm all for inspiring people to give their sleeping imagination a kick in the pants. Painting for The Floozies and Fresh2Death after opening the show for them was a lot of fun, but The B Side's doorman stole about $300 from the bands so we'll be boycotting that venue until they get things sorted out.

Echoes Of An Interstellar Meltdown

> Imagery

These paintings are from my live art residency at Wakarusa Festival's Interstellar Meltdown, a festival-within-a-festival that featured sweet live PA and electronic rock acts all weekend. I was lucky enough to get "official" status for this one (artist's wrist band serial number 00002), so I basically camped at the stage all weekend, up until dawn with the late-night acts every night. It was a super productive weekend. My legs are only now recovering...

2009 06 04 Wakarusa (Studio + Gem, The Floozies, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey) - 24" x 24" masonite board

I've been reading Michael S. Schneider's excellent book A Beginner's Guide To Constructing The Universe. It's a tour of the numerical archetypes 1 through 10, how they manifest in nature, what they meant to the Pythagoreans and Freemasons...and how to construct each in 2D and 3D with a compass and straightedge. So in my last few weeks of living in Phoenix, I spent a few hours every day exploring the arrangement of circles and straight lines to decompose larger polygons into fractal arrays of repeating stars, diamonds, and triangles. I almost didn't want to color this one in, given how lovely and subtle the gloss black and matte black of the paint and board looked together. But I kept photos of that earlier stage and will be making digital stencils for further exploration. And jumping out of the car at Wakarusa to immediately get going on this piece was a blast.

available - 2009 06 05 Wakarusa (Pretty Lights, Praang) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

People have been telling me for over a year that I should try painting on a gradient...so I did. And it was great. Definitely expect a lot more of that...gradients make the appearance of depth even easier than using a black field. And I'm all about the depth.

available - 2009 06 05 Wakarusa (Studio + The Egg, Telepath, Heavy Pets, Heavyweight Dub Champion) - 24" x 24" masonite board

Another experiment pulled from the pages of A Beginner's Guide To Constructing The Universe – this time, the "harmonic decomposition of a square." My mom gave me an octagonal prism lens (kind of like the kind that goes on kaleidoscopes) right before I left for Wakarusa and I was handing it to spun kids all weekend so they could look at this painting. The gold outlines on every harmonic are really sweet in person...this one is so formal and linear that I don't identify with it as much as some of my other works, but that didn't seem to dissuade anyone at the shows.

2009 06 06 Wakarusa (EOTO, 2020 Soundsystem, Madahoochi) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

GOLD BACKGROUND! What else to be said about this one? Except that I threw the plants in kind of late in the process and then had to pull the cubes back out from the background...which reminds me of one time when I was at Clinton Lake in Lawrence KS and saw a UFO fly behind a tree, except that I could still see its lights as if they were in front of the tree, which was very puzzling. Also, I'm really satisfied with the electric sparks coming off the cubes. My friend Nathan who is a huge Futurama dork said this one reminds him of "space honey."

available - 2009 06 06 Wakarusa (Somasphere, Boombox, DJ Rehka) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

Back to black. Above-mentioned Futurama dork was drawing fields of cubes when I hung out with him last week, so figured I'd veer into the realm so skillfully portrayed by Kris Davidson and try to build three dimensions out of two. Freehanding those cubes is getting easier all the time...but barely. There's a bit of multi-perspectival head-twisting with this piece, because if you start from the corners of the trigram it appears that the center cubes are larger but farther away...but if you start from the center, it seems like the closest corner of a tetrahedron pointing toward the viewer. Either way, our confused brains don't want to register this as flat.

available - 2009 06 07 Wakarusa (Shpongle, Chuck Love, Ott) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

Speaking of confused brains, this is what happens on the third night I've desecrated my melatonin cycle in the name of art. Kind of a topographic map of a digital desert under blacklight. I'm eager to explore plenty more concentric lines in future pieces.

> Writing

I was recently given a great extended interview about my art and music by Austin music blogger Tyler Groover on his blog TwoGroove.com – probably the most in-depth any journalist has ever cared to go with me.
Part One - Background
Part Two - Artistic Process
Part Three - Miscellaneous Ranting

I've also been writing for transhumanist magazine H+, where the future of technological and ethical evolution is examined by a community of thinkers who agree we're all about to call into question our deepest assumptions about human nature and existence. My two most recent articles:

Let A Hundred Futures Bloom (on page 67 of their digital edition)
A "both/and" view of the so-called "singularity" that will transform everything we know...my look at numerous possible future scenarios that could bring about a posthuman world, which might not be mutually exclusive.

The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology (not my title!)
It turns out that the "spooky" behaviors of the quantum world – where teleportation, time-travel, and bilocation are par for the course – are the machinery of life. New research indicates that quantum effects might explain the mysteries of biology, finally provide a stable definition of life, and allow us to tap the incredible computational ability of living systems to steer the course of evolution – or fulfill our destiny as pawns of the vast "intelligent design..."

10 Jan 2009 - Critical Mass @ The Uptown Theater

18x24, taken - 2009 01 10 The Uptown Theater (Vibesquad, Somasphere, Johnny C, The Floozies, GEM)

Another investigation of partiality, transparent process (leaving some parts incomplete allows people to follow my train of thought), and layering of complementary geometries (letting hanging "vines" drop over the top of the painting and the partial wall gives it a "trellis" effect...I'll be returning to this combination of discrete abstract and organic elements in future work). I like how the negative space at the bottom gives the entire arrangement a feeling of suspension, like you might be able to duck under it and check it out from the other side.

This was painted in the smallest room of the biggest electronic music event I have ever seen in Kansas City. Three different production groups got together to pack the historic Uptown Theater with people covered in blinky gear; it was pretty amazing. Big events like that come so rarely to the Midwest that the excitement was palpable, everyone was flashing eager smiles to each other as they came in...there was a definite contingent of dressed-up club types, but just as much tie dye, as well as less ostentatious general nightlife aficionados. They don't call these things "raves" anymore...but, uh, what are they called? Cuz that's basically what it was. Only with three rooms on as many floors.

The main room was headlined by Bad Boy Bill and DJ Magic Mike - of whom I can say nothing, because I was in the room put together by Lawrence KS's Cicada Rhythm Productions. Johnny Gallup, the man behind the cicada, has done more than any other person to bring quality electronic music to the KC/Lawrence area, and he's a genuinely friendly guy to boot. EOTO thanked him by name in their liner notes, because he's just that cool. And he brought some great music to the little bar by the entrance where I was camped all night:

G.E.M.
Lawrence local live electronic groovers, the golden child of the scene, here/now. Still in the early line-up flux stage, but strong in The Force. Potential energy...just like an actual gem.

The Floozies
Drums and looped guitar/synth duo with entirely too much funk and talent to be languishing in Kansas City. If you produce shows, book these guys. I've seen them bump two hundred people like they were just rolling out of bed.

Johnny C
A Cicada Rhythms standard, this DJ not only put "tasteful" and "dub-step" in the same room together for the first time, he officiated their wedding and delivered their kids.

Somasphere
Lincoln, Nebraska quintet riding the wave of techno-translated-into-rock, high energy, high tempo, great drummer...they make it around to festivals, so keep an eye out. They're a lot of fun.

Vibesquad
Aaron Holstein of Zilla's DJ/producer project. He actually went to school for music, knows the theory, has killer studio skills, can play bass and keys at the same time...and yet when he gets behind that laptop we can forget all of that and just let his luxurious bass rattle our hips and levitate our waving arms. My first night live painting was for him, so I get all sentimental whenever I have another opportunity to do so...largely because his positivity is unstoppable. Right before his set, some dumb girl unloaded a fire extinguisher over the crowd and they had to close the whole room for half an hour while they cleaned up - we weren't even sure if he was going to be able to play. (What's worse, we all thought it was a fog machine and stayed there, breathing toxic fumes, until we were all coughing and realized something had gone awry.) But then he just booted the whole party back up like nothing had happened, reminded people that nothing really stands between a dancing crowd and a good time.

So yeah, it was a lovely night, and I met some amazing people in the crowd. Everyone was at their sexy best, lots of glitter and feathers and custom ballcaps and trophy girl/boyfriends. A real lust parade, which as far as I'm concerned is one of the best live painting environments. I really wanted to get out of that room a little more and shake it in the main hall...but hey. I had a job to do.

***

In other news, for those interested in art theory and philosophy and psychology and spirituality and where those things all tie together:

Around this time last year, I interviewed the internationally renowned integral philosopher Ken Wilber. We talked at length (75 minutes) about his elaborate (but previously unexplained) perspective on the future of art and music, the common qualities of post-ironic expression, and the spiritual significance of the artist. If you can handle reading along to my transcript with its handy notes (necessary for understanding Ken's dense and specific philosophical language), I HIGHLY encourage hearing what he has to say about this shit. It is SUPER important information for anyone who wants to learn more about how the evolution of consciousness we're all going through is starting to take shape in the arts. I never found a suitable place to publish it, though. So here it is:

Michael Garfield interviews Ken Wilber on Integral Art