Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: crypto art

Showing posts with label crypto art. Show all posts

09 November 2021

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

14 March 2021

New Painting + Digital Reworkings • Re: NFTS • Skytree @ Long Now Blog • Sand Talk Book Club • New Future Fossils

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be
saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in
any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore,
we are saved by love."
—Reinhold Niebuhr

Hello, dear friends (and long-running fond almost-strangers)! Life has been especially full this year so far and I apologize for taking 400% longer than advertised to get this update to you...hopefully it finds you well, and lands precisely where it nourishes you best.

I have A LOT of projects in the pipeline right now but here are some finished works worth sharing:

New Painting: "Party Time" + Digital Reworkings

As usual, I may be getting ahead of myself...but it just felt right to celebrate the end of 2020. Here's a fun, light-hearted moment of color in the weirdest, longest, most ominously-warm-and-dry winter I can remember — created the week of the Capitol riot, which feels humorously apropos.

Available — interested collectors, find more details in my shrinking master list of unsold paintings.

For several reasons, I've decided to slow down and stop offering open-series prints of every new piece...instead, I want to use the original paintings as starting points for remixes and reimaginings, letting them be the raw material for novel digital compositions in the same way my recent music has reworked live recordings into vastly deeper and more ambitious sound collages.

Here's a glimpse at how that works. I haven't decided how, precisely, I want to bring these to market yet, but here are some pieces that grew out of the painting above — really, just snapshots along a kind of improvisational random walk across an evolutionary landscape (see Future Fossils Podcast #161 below):

But digital work didn't used to hold much appeal for me, because you're kind of just "singing into the wind" until you impose some artificial scarcity (printing onto clothing, etc.). Which brings me to:

Yes, I Too Am Minting NFTs

Browse my available NFT artwork at Rarible

Like nearly every other artist you know, I've started minting Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), a blockchain-enabled new medium that (as just one promising example among many) allows creators to take control of their own digital rights management back from exploitative corporations.

(There's been a swirl of controversy around this extremely-hyped new technology, so if you're skeptical about this I invite you to dig into the thoughtful discussion I've been kindling on the issue on my Facebook profile here and here.)

I'm planning some really fun collaborative multimedia NFT projects with friends, but for the time being you can scope and bid on my first few 1-of-1 digital art tokens, each an animated version of one of my most popular paintings, at rarible.com/michaelgarfield. I am very pleased to see these pieces transform with new flowing movement into works more perfectly representational of the psychedelic hyperspace from which they descended into my brain and down my arm onto the canvas. Go check 'em out!

Long Now Feature on Skytree's Deep-Time Electronica

I was and am so pleased to interview my old friend Evan "Skytree" Snyder for The Long Now Foundation blog about how his meditations on deep have have inspired his electronic music and recent "geosonification" (using mineral specimens to drive modular synths).

Future Fossils Book Club on Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk

Our last Future Fossils book club call, for Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, was so good! Thanks especially to Naomi Most & Karja Cygni for contributing such wise reflections to our yarn on how the complex, embodied, relational, context-dependent Indigenous wisdom Yunkaporta performs for us in this work makes sense of violence, paradox, identity, time, nomadic versus sedentary living, and much more.

The video recording and our extensive collection of relevant external links are now up on Patreon.

Please share with anyone you think will benefit.

Hard-Hitting New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

I talk with an intensely-scientific ecumenical preacher about how to face radical climate change with grace and dignity; with two friends and fellow fantasy nerds about the profundity of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials; with Third Eye Drops host Michael Phillip about the mythology and biology of creativity; and with an evolutionary biologist and a Bitcoin entrepreneur about the analogy between digital currencies and mycelial networks.

I also published my first "mailbag" solo episode, in which I had immense fun answering listeners' questions about aliens, death, and making art:

And as far as other podcasts are concerned, I had a blast joining Chris Curran of the Podcast Engineering School for this conversation about the philosophical AND technical aspects of hosting and producing both my podcasts, Future Fossils and Complexity.

Follow My 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!