Ecodelic Explorations: AI Art + Arvo Pärt | Kant on Rationality | Evolutionary Adaptations I Love | Greater Than Code | Agency as Art

Hey everyone!  Lots of big moves lately on my end so here's the short of it:

1) I'm hugely expanding my offerings on Patreon, including providing access to HD images of all of my new digital art experiments to the $10 tiers and up.

2) I am, in the parlance of our times, "aping" into NFTs (at Rarible, Hic Et Nunc, Voice, and Mint Songs for starters).  Before you have a kneejerk reaction to this one way or another, it's part of my commitment to guinea pig myself with new media so I can learn their potentials and hopefully help empower other people to take the leap and/or make valid critiques.  I lost a lot of fans when I beta tested Google Glass, but it was SO important to my understanding of evolution and technology, and the role I could play in urgent discourse on these things, and I feel the same way about exploring NFTs.

(Accessibility matters and I don't want you to feel left behind, so please hit me up with questions or feel free to join the discussion we're having about this stuff in the Discord server.)

3) I'm moving the email newsletter from Substack to Revue and returning to biweekly updates, in part because it's unfair to you to keep sending out enormous entries like this one. Hopefully you agree that more bite-sized pieces are easier and more fun than dropping a six-foot sandwich once every 4-8 weeks.  

Thank you for sticking with me through these changes.  Continuing to make art, music, and writing while helping raise two new humans is insanely difficult and it means the world to me that we're on this journey together.

And now for as much new work as I feel okay to share at one time.  More music and paintings soon!

Experimenting with AI Art:  

"Future Fossils" Takes On A New Whole Meaning

It's always been my intention to fold more of what I do under the Future Fossils name, since the podcast is far from the only work that qualifies (as both a trace of present activity left to the future and a kind of presentiment or foreshadowing for later comprehension).

Lately, that's taken the form of two different styles of digital art exploration. This batch here is AI art (using VQGAN+CLIP on a pre-trained model), grown from text-based prompts using the titles of some of my favorite episodes.

This is so incredibly fun. I love collaborating with machines, feeding analog into digital into analog and back again, seeing what can be learned by taking the other's perspective on the self. This series (curated from a much larger pool of failures) are what I consider "hits" where the computer grokked the spirit of the episode, like those "intuitive" plays made by AlphaGo.

If you're interested in owning one of these as a unique (1:1) NFT, I've started minting my favorite generative art experiments on hicetnunc.xyz/futurefossils, which runs on the Tezos blockchain (which is approximately 2,000,000 times more energy efficient than Ethereum — you can read more about sustainability comparisons here and here).

More info on what you're looking at:

168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz - Festival Time, Life-changing Trips, and Community in COVID

49 - Jake Kobrin - Sex, Death, and The Return of The Black Madonna
163 - Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem - Bitcoin and Fungal Economies
69 - Tim Freke - The Evolution of The Imagination



57 - Conner Habib & Mitch Mignano - Occult Biology
171 - Eric Wargo - Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel
100 - The Teafaerie - DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention
176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, & Sam Gandy - Exploring Ecodelia: Myth, Magic, and Mycelium



120 - Ramin Nazer - Cave Paintings for Future People
160 - Stephen Hershey & Kynthia Brunette - His Dark Materials: Narnia, Fillory, and Coming of Age in The Multiverse
109 - Bruce Damer - The Origins and Future of Life
 91 - An Oral History of The End of "Reality"

Writing New & Old on Art, Philosophy, Evolution

Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the 20th Century's musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses.

Here are my nondual reflections on his work (an OLD piece from 2007, recently republished).

I also wrote a short love letter to one of my favorite turtles in Neo.Life, a magazine about synthetic biology founded by Jane Metcalfe of WIRED Magazine fame:

9 Evolutionary Adaptations We Love

And don't think I ever shared this five-minute lecture I gave at The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks last year, very much in the spirit of Terence McKenna:

Deepfakes and The Archaic Revival

Lastly, I recently appeared in The Santa Fe New Mexican by virtue of being the only person at the Santa Fe Institute to have ever used a Bitcoin ATM.

New Podcast Episodes (Both Home & Away Games)

I had a fabulous conversation on Greater Than Code earlier this year about the economically invisible work of true innovation and discovery...it got deep but stayed accessible.  Recommended.

And then more recently I joined my friend Michael Phillip on his show Third Eye Drops to discuss Immanuel Kant's ideas about rational enlightenment, and ask whether we're living in an age of False Enlightenment (spoiler: both of us think the answer is yes).

Lastly, I've had some AMAZING conversations on Future Fossils, recently:

Lastly: Prints & Original Paintings for Giving Season

Here's my print shop and here's my list of available original works.  Happy to offer unique arrangements to interested collectors — I would far rather you have one of these than for me to keep them hoarded in my studio!

"The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."

—Goethe

We Begin 2018 with 1 Huge Collab + 14 Tiny Paintings + 3 Podcasts + 7 Digital Time-Lapses + 1 New Crypto Newsletter

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope your 2017 wrapped up with beauty, warmth, and generosity, and that your 2018 launched with peace and inspiration.

Updates For People Who Like To Read

I've spent the last month going hard on mostly-secret upgrades, just grinding on a bunch of overdue developments – including daily painting, learning how to paint digitally on a tablet, teaching myself to use a laser cutter, taping awesome conversations for Future Fossils Podcast, and immersing myself in the flood of news on distributed ledger technology (including Bitcoin and over 1000 other projects) and its potential to transform society.  

Now that we're watching evolution in real-time as it transforms society, it feels like time to put my evolutionary insights into practice and help make some sense of where we're headed.  Mapmaking's an art, and art has always felt like mapmaking to me.  (I hope the maps I make and share with you are useful and empowering!  What else would you like mapped?)

I'm also tinkering away at my first studio recordings in too long...the first new tunes will be on Patreon and Bandcamp before you know it.

So!  Some quick links – and then tons of new art and recommended listening:

ALL Poster Prints & Original Paintings PERMANENTLY Discounted

From now on, all of my 11"x17" posters are $15 instead of $20.  I've also permanently lowered prices on all original work.  I'm doing well enough and know that my art could be more affordable and easier to share.  I hope this helps you out!  Browse years of paintings here.

Crypto Reader Weekly Emails

Starting a weekly new email list to share digests of the most interesting links I find on cryptocurrencies and the future of a planetary digital society powered by distributed ledgers and other decentralized technologies.  Sign up here if that sounds interesting to you!

Coloring Book Pages & Digital Painting Time-Lapses

Posting numerous new time-lapse videos of my experiments in iPad's Procreate art app on Instagram.  Watch me discover a new way to render hyperspace!

Watch on YouTube

New Paintings!

Codex/Gnosis (or, The Magic of Reading)

36"x48" – oil and acrylic paint on gallery-wrapped canvas

Just polished off this new collab with Elliot Rogers & William Allan Ross, two of the coolest dudes I know in Austin.  This piece has been an epic journey, and to our surprise and wonder was given props on social media by Raja Ram of Shpongle AND the Dead & Company tour page.  

(We'll have canvas prints soon, signed and numbered in a couple different sizes.  Let me know if you would like me to send details on that, when they're ready.)

Check out my feed on Instagram for plenty of close-ups and shots of it in progress...

Here are a bunch of tiny paintings that I made – the first six 9"x12"s, the last eight 8"x10"s.  I plan to make a ton of these if you would like to order one ($120, s/h included).  Some of these are still available; some have already found new homes as gifts.  Click any of them for a closer look:

   

  

   

   

New Podcast Episodes!

This week I sit down with Jennifer Sodini (EvolveAndAscend.com) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology.

Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.

This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID.

This week’s guest is my friend from college, painter David Titterington. He introduced me to Buddhism AND Gender Studies; paints extraordinary, sometimes-macabre landscapes you might call “trans-realist”; and teaches at Haskell Indian University in Lawrence, Kansas (thus has some interesting angles on the intersection of white and indigenous culture).

COME PARTY WITH ME!

Parting Thoughts

“I’ve heard that the dirtiest place in a Catholic Church is the holy water, because all these people are putting their hands in it. The new paradigm is that bacteria’s good and that strong immune systems are built by eating dirt. And maybe, the people that went to church survive, not because they’re in touch with some deity that’s protecting them, but because they’re in touch with each other’s a**holes! Even if it’s a church that doesn’t use holy water, you’re still in the same small room, breathing the same air, sharing bacteria that way.”

– David Titterington

Merry Christmas! My Biggest Update Ever: 2 Large Collaboration Paintings • 1 Psychedelic Future Rant • 4 New Podcasts • 5 New Live Releases • And A Patreon For You And Me... (Oh, and I'm Going to Australia!)

“I can at best report only from my own wilderness.”

– Loren Eiseley

Greetings, friends.  I know this newsletter's insanely long.  It's just that I've so much to share!  To keep these updates more bite-sized, I will be shifting strategy toward sharing everything on Patreon instead of social media or email – also, ramping up the publication schedule of this blog a little.  I won't be offended if you'd rather not sift through a magazine of new work every month...

But I would be DELIGHTED if you joined my Patreon community and let me shower you with all of this enthusiastic creativity and thoughtful wonder!  I am taking on my biggest and most meaningful projects ever, right now – not just my first book, but my first (legitimate) studio album, a weekly podcast, and some truly epic gallery pieces for upcoming art shows.  

If you would like to be a part of all this as it comes together, join my awesome crew of patrons and enjoy the wealth of inspiration (and fun ephemera) that I have to share with you.  I'm only 17 subscribers from my goal for this year and I hope you're one of them!

New Paintings & Canvas Prints

Leviathan (or, Technocore in Love)

24"x48" - oil and acrylic paint on masonite
Read more / Buy prints

Wet Eschaton (Leviathan 2)

24"x48" - oil and acrylic paint on masonite

Read more / Buy prints

Two collaboration with Elliot Rogers: the top one was mostly my work, and the bottom one was mostly his, but we swapped back and forth a couple times and inflitrated one another's visions.

We finally have high-res SCANS of both of these and can produce museum quality canvas prints!

Click through on either image to read more about the piece and maybe even score yourself a print...

How to Live in the Future – Boom Festival 2016

Stream/Download • Talk Notes
"I’m hoping that by the end of this talk you all feel slightly more empowered to participate in this future, and to participate in the growing number of people worldwide that recognize that it falls upon us as we birth a new age, to love what we create. And to infuse it with love and creativity, and not to reject this baby, but to raise it right. We have this profound opportunity to invest as much beauty and love and creativity into this new space as we possibly can."

My talk from Boom Festival's Liminal Village – in which, while trying to make a case for how to sanely navigate the next few years, I somehow manage to discuss Jurassic Park, Terminator, Pokémon, cat videos, Radiolab, Google, DARPA, Charles Stross, the Singularity, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martine Rothblatt, Genesis P Orridge, nondual philosophy, and angels.

How do you live in the future? By getting used to the new everyday reality in which transcendental mystery, rapid transformation, and networked selfhood is the norm. I caught most but not all of this talk in 360º video, so if "being there" is your thing then watch part 1 and part 2 on YouTube.

New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

We're finally getting into a regular swing with this fantastic conversation series, in which very interesting people talk with me about the future.  Subscribe, rate, and review us on iTunes or Stitcher!

Episode 11 with Shaft Uddin (Tantric Unicorn)

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

This special double episode with "tantric unicorn" Shaft Uddin of SacredSexualAwakening.com (I kid you not) is the craziest, most stimulating and far reaching conversation we've had on the show so far.  This one goes everywhere from polyamory to political theory, shadow work to civil engineering, ecstatic sensuality to time travel, crystal meditations to the TPP, past life regression to permaculture, synesthesia to church, Universal Basic Income to the benefits of global festival community.  Hold on tight!

Episode 12 with Mark Lee (Somnio8)

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

In this week's conversation with visionary painter Mark Lee (aka Somnio8) at Boom Festival's Museum of Visionary Art, we get into scalar waves, free energy devices, getting back to nature with new paradigm technologies – and yes, of course, his awesome art.  Prepare to have your physics challenged...

Guest Appearances on Other Podcasts

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

In this week’s episode of FuturePrimitive, host Joanna Harcourt-Smith invites me into an exquisite conversation about paradox, intensity, casuality and the art of fun. For those of you who don't already know, Joanna once snuck LSD into prison for her lover Tim Leary and is the most dedicated podcaster I've ever met – her archives stretch back over 500 episodes, and are well worth your exploration.

Streaming/Download • Show Notes

A great chat with Third Eye Drops host Michael Phillip and Shamans of the Global Village director Niles Heckman, in which we discuss the war of art, the endless retelling of the hero's journey and Hollywood's amazing lack of imagination, occult teachings in blockbuster films and the lost ayahuasca scene from Avatar, why what you do for a living isn't who you are, and the future of virtual reality immersive storytelling.

(FIVE!) New Live Albums

Two new instrumental improv sets and three singer-songwriter performances – all of which are available for free download to my Bandcamp and Patreon subscribers, and can be streamed for free by anyone (with small but possibly annoying buffer gaps between tracks).

For fans of my instrumental psychedelic ambient work, two new recordings offer novel sonic saunters through the convoluted tunnels of imagination-space:

• Duende was recorded at the SolPurpose Visionary Arts Academy at Sonic Bloom Festival 2016, live music for a painting session hosted by Martina Hoffmann, Randal Roberts, and Morgan Mandala. Rare electric guitar only set. 

• Campfire was a super dark, cold, wet, and smokey backyard party at my friends' in Nashville – and it definitely carries all that autumn spooky splendor.

Three singer-songwriter performances that weave together storytelling, avant-garde guitar technique, and jewel-like songcraft – plus a hefty dose of spontaneity:

• Concert Window was a set I streamed from home, and features first performances of some new songs as well as one completely tasty improv. 

• Whip In was a strong, eclectic set I played for my fiancée's 30th birthday (so there's lots of heart, and silly banter).

• Synergia Ranch was played in an original Buckminster Fuller dome, so this short set (with special guest Andrew Stocker on a trancey throat-singing looper jam) has awesome natural reverb.

Upcoming Festivals

Oh, and I'm going to Australia for a month-long tour in February!  NBD.  (I'm freaking out.)

~ love ~