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

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!

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

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Send HELP (LOL): paypal.me/michaelgarfield | @futurefossils at Venmo

Arkansas & Iceland • Psychedelic Komodo Dragon • Dippin Dots Singularity • New Instrumental Works for Guitar • Four Awesome Future Fossils Episodes

Greetings, friends!  I hope this update finds you well...

Before we get into it, I just want to let you know this weekend's romp at Cosmic Flux in Arkansas is going to be my last live painting gig for quite some time.  

Live art has been awesomely inspiring, adventurous, and brought me friendships that will last a lifetime...but it's not sustainable.  Time and experience invested do not translate into job security or better pay, and the systems aren't in place to support painters without regular collectors.  Ten years is long enough to know I'm not going to get a raise, and that I could be serving better in some other way.  

Not going to give up art entirely – just going to sink my roots in deeper, travel less, get more done, and align to the most valuable work I can be doing.  

Right now that is Future Fossils Podcast (huge thanks to all 101 of you supporting me on Patreon!); my work as resident philosopher for the Crypto Crew cryptocurrency web learning community; writing How To Live in the Future; and finally delivering that studio LP of psych-futurist acoustic-electronic love-songs I've been promising for years.

But in the meantime, see you in Arkansas this weekend!

I'm also totally excited to attend this seminar in Iceland with my graduate advisor, integralist Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, where I'll learn how to expand our ideas of "capital" and "impact" to perform magical and meaningful tweaks to organizations and their cultures.  

Tuning companies and governments to the accelerating transformations of our century feels like The Good Work and I'm honored that I have this chance to forge ahead and bring back vital insights to you from this seminar:

The overall mood this spring is "immense transition" – and hopefully I can inspire you by letting go of some of who I used to be to make more room for who I can be.  As always, I'm committed to a constant process of growth, learning, and discovery so I can bring it back to you...

I'm selling a handful of paintings at unprecedented discounts to afford this trip.  If you've wanted a piece from me but didn't think you had the funds, let's pleasantly surprise each other!  Drop me a line and I'll send you a list of what I still have.

That's all for now.  I love you.  Thank you and may all your work this week go smoothly...

Michael

"Living Fossil"

2018 • acrylic/canvas • 40"x30"

Obtain Prints

(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)

Around this time last year I painted a giant rooster in the southern hemisphere to commemorate the "year of the fire rooster". I feel like I don't really control what comes through when - because I had it in my mind that I was going to paint a monitor lizard when I got to Australia and that so did not happen. So last summer, visiting my painter friends in Colorado, I thought I would double back and catch up with that lizard...and then I hated the painting I'd started and left it in the garage for 6 months.

Never one to simply walk away from something, though, I figured I might shine some love on this one at the Llano Earth Art Festival, an awesome little yearly gathering in Central Texas. It's gone on for the last 4 years but this year I got to invite four other painter friends to join the team. Live art is a team sport. Their warmth and friendship made it easier for me to love this piece again.

Shortly after I had the thought that a Komodo dragon, while not technically an Australian animal, is sort of like "the dog of lizards' and therefore may be appropriate as a "year of the earth dog" painting, someone came up to me and said it looked like a dog. So: vindicated.

Thanks to every one of my artist friends whose friendship made it into this lizard: Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Andrew Thompson, Martin Cash, Will Ross, Chance Roberts, Elliot Rogers, Dixon Stovall, y'all alright. :)

"Crystalline Rows (aka Dippin Dot Singularity)"

2018 • acrylic/canvas • 18"x24"

Obtain Prints

(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)

Fact: In the future, ice cream will be revolutionized by the handicraft of mad inventor Charles Dippin, whose nanotechnological breakthrough will enable us to miniaturize ice cream scoops to the size of tiny "dots." These "Dippin Dots" then self organize into a quasicrystalline fluid lattice that adapts and learns by shifting frozen nodule matrices. This painting is a photorealistic depiction of the last image taken by the security camera at the lab desk of Charles Dippin on September 22nd, 2049 - the moment just before the core mass of streaming, undulating, flowing-but-faceted "Dots" all disappeared in a white flash, presumably into the past and who knows what fate...

The dots were organizing along invisible manifolds of influence, gathering at nodes and junctures of a gauzy floral sculpture that sang as it flowed together and apart, harmonics of the network chatter and evolving anatomy of a billion streaming balls of cream-based computronium. Dippin knew his work was then complete, and he surrendered his flesh into the vanilla-and-chocolate goo to be reborn as a submodule of the new metamorphic god-mind as it grew - so long as the time travel didn't damage its internal architecture somehow, so long as its impulses wouldn't be scrambled in the risky transit, rendering the baby god just senseless, mindless ice cream on the other side of time...

Garden Underground: Live at SquareRüt Kava Bar, 13 Jan 2018

Stream/Download Here

My friend and frequent collaborator Will Ross called this the best set he's ever heard me play.  It's definitely chill and spacious, atmospheric and emotional, just how I like them.

I've been exploring the acoustic guitar as an electronic instrument for ten years...this is some of what's grown out of that.  (Some other fan favorite releases are here, here, here, and here.)

Patreon and Bandcamp subscribers get it free.  Everyone else can have it for the price of a latte.

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

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