🎉 Happy New Year! Lasers + Dinosaurs + Singularities

Now that we're TRULY over the rainbow...

Happy New Year, everyone!  My birthday comes two weeks after Christmas, so this time of year is always hopeful and uplifting in spite of — or rather in juicy harmony with — the vibe of wintry contemplation, holiday burnout, and bare-treed, sky-wide reflections on time, life, and everything.  02020 gave us all so much to think about and learn from, recover from and build on.

Like I imagine you are, I'm looking forward into 02021 a little battle-worn but clarified and eager to explore some new horizons. This year is going to be different — I'm not quite sure yet how, but I am always grateful for this moment when our culture calls us to reach into mystery and possibility each year. And in the meantime, I have a trove of unpublished work I'm eager to share in the months to come.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who bought a painting in my moving sale and helped us fix up and furnish our new family home!  Still some time left to contribute and score art at wholesale prices — I have just a handful of originals remaining, and I'm at work on a raft of new small studio pieces, but I'm also open for commissions — email me with inquiries.

And now here are a few new things. More soon. See you in the Future Fossils Discord Server...!

Love,

Michael

"Urvogel" (First Bird) Archaeopteryx Wood Ornaments

I made these on my Glowforge as Christmas gifts — short philosophical musing below on what it feels like to try and translate the analog uniqueness of painting to this digital medium.

They're not currently available for sale but I'm happy to talk about commissioned laser-enabled designs, if you're interested! Scheming about additional perks for Patreon supporters and happy to take suggestions for the best possible applications of my artwork to laser cut and engraved merchandise.

Sometimes I think there must be something like ASMR for eyeballs, looking at very tiny things or seeing things in neat rows, that satisfies the brain's prediction reward circuitry and is partly responsible for the mechanized aesthetic that dominates modernity. It feels like an ironic hijack of biophilia and our biologically innate love of forms like tree branches and river deltas: the fractal order of our evolved life-world swapped out for a lower-dimensional shadow of the ancient mystery of reproduction.
Walter Benjamin explored this, and asked about what sacredness still lives in mechanically-duplicated art forms, in his most famous essay; WJT Mitchell updated that essay for our biocybernetic century. And as technology evolves according to the same rules as everything else, it looks and acts more and more like the kind of living systems we're used to: dynamic, mutable, branching, turbulent, unpredictable. 

Something of that was captured in these laser cut Archaeopteryx ornaments I made to break in my Glowforge this year — like (but admittedly much simpler than) printing Leeloo in The Fifth Element, seeing row after row of echoes of one of the world's most unique and precious fossils feels to me like a portal into a future in which human and nonhuman life alike becomes both more ephemeral and priceless, and we develop a more nuanced understanding of individuality and selfhood.

(When you can be copied like any other computer file, what makes you unique? Your context. Your history. What cannot be copied. See also Westworld, which I discussed with Michael Phillip way back in Episode 14 of Future Fossils Podcast, and Episode 65 with John David Ebert and I unpacking the mythical and spiritual themes of Blade Runner 2049.)
Anyway...

Mid-Singularity Trialogues with Ramin Nazer & The Teafaerie

Listen anywhere you go for podcasts.

Reporting from mid-singularity, friends and returning guests Ramin Nazer, The Teafaerie, and I run for several full-court passes on augmented reality, telepresence, simulation theory, the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi, how to enjoy the rapids of change, and much more.

If that doesn't satisfy your thirst for weird sh*t, go listen to more about virtuality, artificial consciousness, and neuroscience, in my appearance on the Voices in the Dark podcast.

Book Club Recordings Now Free For Everyone

ICYMI I've made all of the Future Fossils Podcast Book Club recordings entirely free, moving them from behind the Patreon paywall so everyone can appreciate the deep and illuminating discussions we've had about some of the coolest books I've ever read. Enjoy!

Follow My Chill Spotify Playlist (Recommendations)

This is where I share all of the cool new music I discover. Chillout, electro-folk, acoustic instrumentals, avant-pop, film scores, and more — it is as everywhere as I am, but I hope that you agree it all coheres.

If you have tracks you'd like to add, please share them in the Future Fossils Discord Server!

Follow me elsewhere:

Spotify | YouTube | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Soundcloud | Bandcamp

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Clearing House & Moving On (Plus Twelve New Podcast Episodes)

I could see a new world with my middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the walls behind the sky, the sky behind the infinite. The walls became fountains, the fountains became arches, the domes skies, the sky a flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I thought I was the quickest mind alive and the quickest with words, but words cannot catch up with these transformations, metamorphoses.

– Anaïs Nin

End-of-an-Era Art Sale

Well, it's been eleven years since I first painted at a concert. Eleven years, 450 paintings, 300 custom hats, a thousand different musical collaborators on three continents...it's been an awesome run.

I won't stop making art, but LIVE art's going to take a nap for now.  (My last live painting gig in Austin will be at the Save Our Springs Alliance Holiday Party on December 7th.)

Between my new job at the Santa Fe Institute and preparations for my first child (due next spring!), I'm undergoing major shifts – and that means letting one or two plates fall so I can spin the rest.

Future Fossils Podcast isn't going anywhere...

The psychedelic field guide coloring book will continue growing page by page on Patreon...

My music's going (even deeper) underground while I get serious about recording a new album...

And I'm getting rid of nearly every painting I have left. They won't fit in our new apartment, and I'm in a giving spirit, so if you would like one of the last big, live originals I'll be making for A WHILE – well, here you go.  Click on the paintings for the swiftly-shrinking list of your remaining choices.

The list price doesn't matter to me anymore; what matters is these pieces finding a good home.  

Feel free to make an offer that you worry might offend me.  We can work it out.

Thank you for every way you've been a part of this adventure, all these years...

New Digital Painting & Time-Lapse Video

In other news, I'm edging slowly into digital, and plan to stream more art from home (on YouTube and Facebook) to compensate for disappearing from the festival scene for a while.

Here is a newer piece, along with a time-lapse of its creation, narrated with an excerpt from the awesome episode of Future Fossils featuring philosopher and culture critic John David Ebert:

(You can grab prints of this piece at my art store.)

TWELVE New Podcast Episodes

Okay, so yeah:  this isn't really a "biweekly" newsletter anymore, is it?  Sorry about that.

Anyway, here are the last dozen episodes of Future Fossils Podcast – some of my favorite ever!

Awaiting you is my first science fiction ("An Oral History of the End of 'Reality'"); my epic first panel discussions for the show; and my long-awaited chat with Erik Davis round out the first 100 episodes – with the Episode 100 slot going to The Tea Faerie – and then we tie it up in 101 with a deep dive into this show's recurring themes...

      

Facts are very special objects, which is why they must be constructed through such careful

and painstaking methods. But they are still human fabrications. We are all wearing

tool belts here, scientists and mystics alike, fashioning experience into

artifacts and realities that feedback on us, inevitably, as stories, shaping

us in turn.

– Erik Davis