Cooped-Up Creativity: New Music • Psychedelic Eggs Galore • Future Fossils Episodes with Erik Davis & Nora Bateson

“The way we discuss what needs to be done now will shape what it is possible to do. This is not a moment to fix a machine, this is a moment to compose new cultures.”

- Nora Bateson

Hey friends,

If you're feeling lonely, cooped up, or just in need of some smart conversations, I hope you'll join some of my friends and I for the weekly casual video hangouts we've been having every Sunday.  We've been talking about all kinds of things in light of our unprecedented situation: philosophy, economics, personal creative process, family life... We're having two more of these open discussions on 19 & 26 April at 2 pm Mountain. If it'd help you, I hope you'll join us. Details here.

And now, here's all of the new creative work I've bled into lately, for the benefit of everyone.

My love to all of you. Stay safe and happy, and don't forget to ask for help.

best,

Michael

New Single: Always Catching Up

Listen anywhere you go to stream music.

Or download the lossless audio for free at Bandcamp.

My next album continues to ooze forth at approximately one song per four months. Songwriting and production is the one place in my life where I can create art selfishly, uncompromisingly, obsessed, and etch away at lovingly-crafted intricate and living works for months or years, feeling all the while as if I'm swept up in The Great Work.

The first two songs of this as-yet-unnamed, long overdue LP are here, along with their backstories.

Here's the latest tune, on time and mind, as well as lyrics and the story of its very psychedelic origins.

Walking, according to physiologists, is a controlled fall forwards.

Toddling to tottering, all of us are always one step from and one step toward.
But life's just like that. Languages grow at the rhythm of walking pace,
and every idea you inhabit is seconds behind your Original Face...

Four New Spring Paintings

Here are four smaller (12") paintings I've cooked up in the last couple cooped-up weeks. No names for any of these. Top two on stretched canvas, bottom two on cradled artboard. Check my Instagram for different angles/lighting/context. Each one is up for grabs; I won't make prints.

Commercial break: now is a great time to buy art, because the artists need support and deals abound. If you have ever wanted to own a piece of mine, drop me a line. I will be glad to show you what I've got and give you a post-apocalyptic (half or more off) discount...

 

 

And now, two awesome conversations that I hope will help you make good sense of life right now:

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 140

Listen & Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

We’re extra lucky to have not one but three amazing guests this week: culture critic and religious scholar Erik Davis, philosopher and author Tony Blake, and trickster historian Mitch Mignano. A deep dive into the mythic and mystical dimensions of our moment — including nonhuman agency, the virus as teacher, Pan and panic and pandemics, solutionism isn’t the solution, the danger of efficiency logic, and a media diet for meditation on the darkness of nature.

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 141

Listen & Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

This week’s guest is Nora Bateson, Director of the International Bateson Institute, author, film-maker, and founder of the Warm Data Lab. Nora is a magician when it comes to getting people to live the relational and dynamic, the embodied and incompressible. I’m honored that we got to sit down for a US-Sweden Zoom call and talk about how current world events touch down in the messy and beautiful everyday.

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems,

and Creative Opportunity

Read my new piece at Medium.

A transcript of Episode 139 in which I rant about our situation from the POV of an armchair systems thinker and weird artist, invoking everyone from Alan Moore to Charles Eisenstein:

"The best possible outcome I can imagine from this is to witness all of the creative and intelligent people who have been shackled to pointless, stupid, undignified work for our entire lives rise up and create something new and beautiful together. Emergencies often elicit the best of our humanity, a concern for the true priorities of our existence. These are moments when we are called to act on what really matters, and to contribute to our communities and to the legacy that we pass on, at a time when good ideas are unusually quick to spread."

ICYMI: Free Coloring Book!

Get your coloring on!

No strings attached at all, but I do hope I'd get to see your pages when you color them!  (Pictured: my friend's kid going ham on some trippy doodles.)

And that's that.  Thank you for digging in.  I hope that you and yours are safe and happy...

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

Waterloo Festival Team Mural | Listening To Plants | Psychonautics | New Coloring Pages & Timelapse | Future Fossils Book Club

Okay, it's been too long. So much is happening and it's all just getting faster all the time (unless you're software). My partner and I are about to have a kid. We moved to Santa Fe. I work for these insane(ly) brilliant people now. I'm almost out of paintings, and I can't make them fast enough with all the other things I'm doing at the moment...

That said, here's tons of stuff, as usual. I'm always here if you write back, and hope the upgrades' going smoothly for you – meaning easily, which probably means a river-bending, highly corrugated kind of way, like brains (they're better at computing when they're dense, so take it as a compliment).

I love you all and feel a thing about this taking so damn long to make it to you. Anyway!

The Waterloo Music Festival Collaboration Mural

A painting made in the craziest environment, at the most complete and awesome festival installation I have ever proposed, with a team of artists I can't believe I mustered into such intense collaboration.

A giant piece – nine-plus feet wide and four high – that spilled over into months of meetings and late sessions, seven of us focusing on areas and balanced coverage, and arguing a lot, and learning...all the while the looming focus of my living room, for months, and detailed in this photojournal.

This piece is in a private collection in Austin, now, but we finally can make some prints for everyone who cheered us on through this foolishly ambitious project.  Thank you!

Artist Instagram Accounts:

Michael Garfield • Elaine Alonzo • Chaeli Cardenas • Diego Zion 

Byron Aldridge • William Allan Ross • Chelsea Schulz

New Music: Listening to Plants at Starseed Gardens

Free Download (As Always)

Recorded in maybe the most magical place I have ever been, late on a sweaty summer night, surrounded by an acres-wide nursery of medicine plants growing from the black earth of a dead volcano, a short walk from a giant ancient fig tree and a slightly longer walk from the easternmost point of the continent and white sharks. 

Starseed Gardens was a standout moment in my tour Down Under and a precious, moving place. This is the music that emerged in ritual there, a song to the intelligence around us. 

Performed on acoustic guitar and hardware electronic effects. 

In memory of Dan Schreiber. 

I'm In This Movie (Speaking & Music)

If you don't already know, Shane Mauss is one of the smartest comedians on the beat right now; he hosts Here We Are, a science interview podcast that's really cool; and he's been candid (on Duncan Trussell's show, as well as on Future Fossils Episode 58) about how his psychonautic adventures helped push him over the brink into a delusional mania and temporary institutionalization (although, I think he needs to emphasize that he also quit alcoholism stone cold at that time, which may have had some tiny thing to do with it). 

This is his documentary of those adventures, and I'm in it cross-cut with the legendary James Fadiman, talking about Richard Doyle's writing on human-plant co-evolution and its role in the emergence of language...I also have a music credit, and a handful of great queues throughout, along with awesome animations by Ramin Nazer and the most paradoxically sober reflection you could expect from a documentary about psychedelic self-experimentation.

But for many other reasons that will make sense in retrospect, I highly encourage you to preorder it. One of those reasons is to help it up the charts. (I don't get a cut; I just want this conversation on the front page.)

This New Time-Lapse Video with John David Ebert (Future Fossils #65)

YouTube | Facebook

These New Future Fossils Coloring Book Pages

Five new coloring book pages for a total of 25 so far. I add new ones as often as I can!

These New Podcast Episodes & Special Features

 

   

 

In addition to the six latest episodes of Future Fossils Podcast, which span the gamut from the most confessional and bizarre episodes I've ever released to the most professional and discrete, here are two special offerings – one public and one for Patreon supporters only. 

We've started Future Fossils Book Club with an awesome conversation on the even-more-awesome Blindsight by Peter Watts, a truly important and unsettling work. And I also compiled dozens of my favorite excerpts from the show's 2018 run to make The Sediment of Sentiments, a kind of meta-fossil for everybody to enjoy:

  

These Two Silly Interviews:

Voyage Dallas • Voyage Houston

Origin stories, if you're bored. Weirdly got asked to do the same interview by the same magazine in two different cities where I don't live, but hey. It was an opportunity to play. :)

This Isn't New, But Still:

Patreon supporters get 10-20% off all my prints and merchandise at michaelgarfieldart.com:

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival • New Coloring Book Pages & Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

“Nations are Destroy’d or Flourish in proportion as

Their Poetry, Painting and Music are Destroy’d or Flourish:

The primeval state of Man was Wisdom, Art and Science.”

– William Blake

Notes from InterPlanetary Festival

 

Pay-what-you-like (even zero) download in any audio format

Last weekend I participated in one of the coolest festivals I've ever been a part of – InterPlanetary Festival was the starting pistol shot for the Santa Fe Institute's InterPlanetary Project, a new initiative to open up the esteemed complexity science think-tank's research and conversation about the future of our species to...well, the rest of our species.

I interviewed SFI President David Krakauer about it on Future Fossils Podcast Episode 75, and there will be many more interviews from SFI associates to come – and that's just it: this was the juiciest collection of brilliant minds I've ever seen come together for the purposes of celebrating something. And in this case, they were celebrating a new public era in which collective intelligence out-performs the ivory tower and we can start to think and work together on the biggest questions facing civilization – questions like, "How did life begin?" and "How can space exploration and sustainable stewardship of Earth's biosphere be pursued in synergy?"

This event gathered planetologists, science fiction authors, technologists, digital artists, and other genius weirdos together to entertain these questions as an annunciation of this newer, more inclusive phase for SFI.

I played concert of my own sci-fi-inflected songs – as well as offer something I have wanted to do for a while: live notes, projected on a giant LED screen on stage, during three panel discussions and one awesome concert. Inspired by Kelvy Bird's philosophy of "Generative Scribing," I wanted to go beyond merely taking notes on the panels to providing an additional idea channel during the talks to synthesize and surface additional insights.

It was a hit. Here are the results (along with my rapidfire live paintings from Rob Schwimmer's incredibly dope theremin and Haken Continuum sci-fi soundtrack concert):

Shareable Google Photos Album of all my Live Notes & Digital Art from IP Fest

YouTube Playlist of my Live Notes

New Coloring Book Pages

Download these pages on Patreon

I've been starting to put in maybe too much time on this coloring book project...making each page maybe too intricate, but naw, that's silly talk.

Patreon supporters get each page in print-friendly .jpg, .psd, and .pdf to suit your tablet/printer pleasure. Right now, $5 gets you access to all twenty pages and staying subscribed means you'll get at least a few more every month in addition to the podcast extras, music, and more. Thanks and enjoy!

New Future Fossils Episodes

Download Episode 0077

Download Episode 0078

Download Episode 0079