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 

The First Google Glass Music Videos | Cowboys Underground | New Hats & Shirt | My Burning Man Schedule

"Maps of reality are so powerful that we forget that they are maps."

– Rich Doyle

"Language is more powerful than, and prior to, any other form of technology."

– Charles Eisenstein

Well, guys, we are over the rainbow.  I just got back from a week in New York City, getting initiated into Google's Glass Explorer Program, that made my already-synchronistic life look like the black and white intro to Wizard of Oz.  I have so, SO many amazing things to share with you – too many to fit into this newsletter, which I may have to morph to a weekly offering in order to keep pace with the accelerating rate of amazement.  (It's paradoxically the only way I can respect your time – by not making you read an entire magazine every time I send you updates.)

To my knowledge, I'm the first person in the world to record point-of-view video from stage while performing live music – at Penny's Open Mic in the East Village:

"It Hurts So We're Not Dead" in NYC #throughglass

Watch in HD w/ Lyrics | Like/Comment/Share

...and then I stopped off on my way out of town at Evan "Skytree" Snyder's apartment to film this music video in his awesome bedroom mirror:

"The Cartographers" in NYC #throughglass

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Download the MP3

And in just 48 hours, I'm celebrating the end of José Arguelles' Dreamspell Calendar AND psychedelic visionary Aldous Huxley's birthday by screencasting my performance at Gratifly Festival through a projector and onto the stage behind me – closing the loop between artist and audience, letting people see firsthand what I'm doing with my equipment and what they look like on stage.  THIS is digital empathy, people!  A true and utter paradigm shift.  I'm extremely honored to have this opportunity and am already eager to share it with you.  I hope you'll be there but if you aren't, worry not: like everything these days, it WILL be recorded.  ;)

Now, of course, I haven't stopped sharing my "Landscape Channel" video series, which is another angle on the "Michael's point-of-view" idea and an attempt to share with you some of the beautiful places I get to inhabit in my travels.  Here's one from Om Vibrations 2013, where you get to see the amazing lighting design by Synaesthesiax that made this cave jam such a treat for the eyeballs:

"Cowboys Underground" – Live in Longhorn Cavern

Watch in HD | Like/Comment/Share | Download the MP3

New Hats for The Headspace

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A series of collaborations with my main conspirator-in-art and awesome roommate, Chaeli Cardenas.

Check out The Headspace for more great custom designs by me and a bunch of other artists...

New Hat & T-Shirt for Herbivore Designs

My third artist signature hat for Grassroots California is about to be released through Austin's own Herbivore Designs.  This is the first hat I've painted with a final embroidered product in mind, and in my personal opinion it's my best yet:

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The hat has an accompanying Herbivore Designs tee – I really enjoyed getting back to my roots with pen and ink line illustration and going full-melt on this life-after-death design:

Order This T-Shirt Here

Burning Man: Oh it's on.

Yes, it's true.  I'll be staging my humbly triumphant return to this synchronicity pressure cooker just in time to contribute my music and ideas to some of the finest speaker line-ups this side of the millenium...

(I'll also be roving the Playa in my new life as a Glass Correspondent, covering all of the most amazing new technologies and art installations I can find.  Stay tuned for more about that in the weeks to come as I gear up for a crowdfunding campaign to defray my expenses and share a few of the amazing inventions I encountered on my trip to New York.)

My full BRC schedule is TBA – but for now, check out the amazing offerings by these two camps:

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 may remember Palenque Norte as the annual conference co-founded by Terence McKenna back in the 1990s.  It is still going strong in Black Rock City and has featured such luminaries as Alex & Allyson Grey, Alexander & Ann Shulgin, John Perry Barlow, Bruce Damer, and more...

So Begins My Tour of the Southeast...

The Love Without End Tour rolls through South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio starting tomorrow.  Check my website's sidebar for a full calendar, or click the pics below for highlights:

Awesome first-year thing.  If all goes according to plan, my first performance with Glass.

An official Gratifly after-party!

A Unitus Festival pre-party ft. the music of The Fresh French, Kynara, & Feverkin.

This one came out of nowhere and is gearing up to be one of this summer's sleeper hits.

A tiny but juicy event in the beautiful mountains outside Boone, NC.

My fourth year out of four. Easily one of the best festivals of the entire year. Period.

And thank you for reading!  I hope you get as much out of this as I put into it.  Feedback is always welcome.  May your life be full of inspiration, empowerment, and beauty!