Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: cyberguitar
Showing posts with label cyberguitar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cyberguitar. Show all posts

05 April 2023

✨πŸŽΈπŸ¦– Leaving SFI for Even Bigger Projects...

I'm building a new website! This is my last blog post at Blogger.
Please follow my updates and new work at MichaelGarfield.Substack.com
and stay tuned for the launch of FutureFossils.org. πŸ’—πŸ––πŸΌ✨


Announcing A New Book + Book Club on Jurassic Park • Guest Appearances on KMO.show + Rainbow Brainskull • New Live LP + Music Videos + Concert Dates


✨ Saying Goodbye to The Santa Fe Institute


Last Friday was the end of an era. Leaving SFI was not an easy choice, but it is time to synthesize what I have learned from years of complex systems science study and communication in some “grown-up” projects.

Here is my announcement (also pinned to Facebook and to LinkedIn):

🧡 Today is my last day at @sfiscience! It's been an honor and a pleasure to oversee SFI's social media for the last 4.5 years, to launch and grow #ComplexityPodcast into an internationally-charting show, and to work amidst such a thriving and inspiring intellectual community...

πŸ¦– Join My Book Club for Jurassic Park!


What's next? Here is an update on the HUGE undertaking I'm already working on — a new book, book club, and podcast project exploring how the science and philosophy of the Jurassic Park franchise (books, films, games, AND rides) sheds light on and entangles with the evolution of AI, VFX, biotech, and other monsters of modernity since JP’s first edition back in 1990:


Michael Crichton’s legendary techno-thriller is more relevant than ever now…which is why I’m resurrecting the Future Fossils Book Club to explore it! Grab your copy here.

The JP Book Club starts on April 29th and will mix asynchronous discussion in the Facebook group and Discord server with live calls. Patrons get a deep dive into privatized science, the breakdown of the boundaries between reality and virtuality, chaos and complex systems sciences, and science fiction as self-fulfilling prophecy.

There will be at least two live calls for this book, and then more for The Lost World later on this summer. If you have to miss them, they will be recorded.

Then, in the months to come, I'll interview a very heavy-hitting roster of scientists, philosophers, critics, and artists about all this on Future Fossils…including several of the SFI researchers whose planned episodes of Complexity Podcast I had to cancel. These two shows will start to bleed together…Future Fossils will stay weird, but also start to feature more rigor and prestigious guests.
It is a GIANT leap of faith to take this on…I hope you'll grab your front row seats, become a paid subscriber, and help me feed my family while I’m bringing all of this to life!

Read more and weigh in on Facebook or Twitter.


🎸 New Videos + Live LP Reviewed



My latest live recording marries science-inspired folk songs, high-tech improv explorations, and psychoactive concert banter into a truly magic stew I’m glad to share in full with everyone as a Bandcamp exclusive!

Anyone who buys it gets a secret playlist link with videos showcasing twenty extra very juicy minutes from the show (also available to Patreon and Substack members, if you missed that email).
"I think this is his best yet...not just a good record but this is an interesting person...worth making an effort to appreciate."

πŸ™πŸΌ @WarmthHighest reviews my latest live @Bandcamp-exclusive #psychedelic #folk album: https://birdboyblizzard.music.blog/2023/04/01/a-better-trip-live-at-the-jean-cocteau-cinema-supporting-shane-mauss-by-michael-garfield/ cc @shane_mauss @CocteauCinema



🎧 New Podcast Guest Appearances



Guest on KMO.show Episode 1 (with my buddy Kevin Wohlmut!)

"In this inaugural episode of the KMO Show, KMO, Michael Garfield of the Future Fossils podcast and mutual friend, Kevin Wohlmut, discuss the dawning of the epistemological apocalypse. Thanks to AI, we can't really trust our eyes or our ears anymore. Deep faked images and voices can produce 'evidence' that people said and did things they never said or did. How do we select our reality tunnels when almost anything can be faked in real time? Do we give up on truth seeking and just believe whatever floats our boat, or are there general principals [sic] or trustworthy oracles we can depend on?"

Part one of a two-part trialogue that will conclude on Future Fossils 201. Stay tuned!


Guest on Rainbow Brainskull Episode 81

If you want to hear me at my absolute SLOWEST, then enjoy this conversation I had with Ramin Nazer after pulling an all-nighter taking care of a cranky baby. I'm ordinarily not a fan of people listening to conversations at 2x speed because I try to pack my own episodes with as much information as possible, but in this case I think you might actually get something approximating my ordinary cruising velocity if you did so. Anyway, it was a superb conversation in spite of the fact I was a total mess (and he didn't bother to cinch it up in post-production, which I take to be basically a love letter to my mind, however ill-conceived) and I love Ramin to High Heaven so go show him some love…


🎢 Upcoming Musical Events


I WILL be making audio and video recordings of these shows for everyone who couldn’t make it. But if you live in or near Santa Fe I hope I’ll see you there!

05 October 2022

New Chill-Out EP + 1:1 Print Series • My Cataract: An Initiation • Upcoming Show in Santa Fe • Custom Hats Are Back!

Life has handed me some lemons, lately. This is my lemonade:

New Instrumental Cyberguitar EP Ephemeropolis

"Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe, and any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down, and to set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."

I've been thinking A LOT lately about home, loss, wandering, fugitivity, transience, and the "new normal" of being forever in transition. None of this is entirely new — these themes have pervaded my entire life — but they've really come to the forefront of my contemplations over the last year, bringing into focus how much of my work emphasizes the temporary and fleeting beauty of our lives. "Castles made of sand," as Jimi Hendrix put it. This latest release makes explicit what has always been implicit in my electroacoustic guitar work especially: the Heraclitean revelation that we never step in the same flow twice...

(So far feedback is unanimously positive; my friends are calling this "a real vibe" and "vibey as fΓΆk," if you can see a theme developing...)

It was grown in the summer sun, reaped and winnowed under moonlight, bundled and shipped on the autumnal equinox. It is the harvest from two hours of live performance, leavened and ready to bake in your ears to rise and make fractals in your brain. Recorded live at the Santa Fe Society of Artists pop-up gallery in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 27 August 2022. Improvised on guitar, voice, and electronics. Cover illustration prompted in Midjourney. Dedicated to the burners.

Listen to or purchase it at Bandcamp or add it to your playlists at Spotify or Apple Music.

40 Variations on "Ephemeropolis": An AI Art Collection

Unique AI-generated variants for the new EP's cover art. Each variant will only be printed ONCE as an 11"x11" signed print on glossy cardstock; select your variant number at checkout and I will delete the option as soon as I have received your order, guaranteeing you will remain in perpetuity THE ONLY person with that print.

The series is comprised of 40 unique HD designs in total. Think of these as analog NFTs...it's an experiment exploring the fascinating intersection of digital abundance and artificial scarcity, a performance of the flickering and transient nature of the temporary cities from which the EP draws its name.

Every print comes with a free download of the EP in both WAV and MP3 (preview it on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music) AND a link to the image file itself, in case you ever want to replace the original due to damage.

PS — If you want to learn more about my work with, and philosophical musings about, AI artwork, dig into my blog and recent appearances on The Jim Rutt Show and Third Eye Drops Podcast.

New Future Fossils Episode 192 Gets Esoteric

This week on Future Fossils I go solo and get reflective on age, noise, loss, mystery, stars and angels, dreams and seasons, modern science and the retrieval of magic...

Because I have a cataract. At age 38. What the hell?

cataract (n.) — early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate, furious rush of water," from Latin cataracta "waterfall," from Greek katarhaktes "waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis," noun use of an adjective compound meaning "swooping, down-rushing," from kata "down" (see cata-). The second element is traced either to arhattein "to strike hard" (in which case the compound is kat-arrhattein), or to rhattein "to dash, break." Its alternative sense in Latin of "portcullis" probably passed through French and gave English the meaning "eye disease characterized by opacity of the lens" (early 15c.), on the notion of "obstruction" (to eyesight).

Join Me on October 14th Live in Santa Fe!

That's all I can say about this. I've wanted to play a show at Honeymoon since before the pandemic. Their kombucha is amazing. And my daughter is so excited to dance with me during my set, she talks about it every day. Even if it's cold that night, I'm glad to be outdoors for this because there's nothing like the sound of my guitar reflecting off of buildings, pulling in the unsuspecting passers-by, while I gaze into the distance at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as they disappear into the gloaming. MMM.

If I can stream it live, I will.  Subscribe to me on YouTube if you want to know next time I'm live.

I'm Offering Custom Hats Again!

They're back! I was out of the business for years but am now making my custom-painted lids available, taking orders in time to bless up your holidays. I've painted 350 custom lids over the years and cherish the opportunity to make yours (or your loved one's) a totally one-of-a-kind fashion accessory you'll cherish for years to come. Learn more and order yours today.

Follow My Music Discovery Playlist

In parting, a reminder that I share the music that I find and love right here, and while this is a wildly diverse and very long collection you cannot deploy for a specific mood, I hope it serves as inspiration.

03 February 2022

New Showcase Painting • New Concert Album + Music Videos • Future Fossils: Chris Ryan, Jim Rutt, Web3 + Complex Systems, Metamodern Magick, & More

“Only a vision of the whole, like that of a saint, a madman or a mystic, will permit us to decipher the true organizing principles of the universe."

Buckle up, friends. This is the most epic edition of this newsletter in its thirteen years of existence...

I recommend opening this in a new tab to devour at your leisure, like my current long-game effort to assemble the Lego "Tumbler" Batmobile.  :)

Happy Year of the Tiger!
NEW ART

"My Bright Companions"
acrylic paint on masonite panel
48"w x 32"h

My first big new painting since before the pandemic! This piece started as part of my science communication fellowship at the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, live painting to amazing talks on evolutionary biology, cognitive science, cyborg experiments, animal intelligence research, and more — and finally came to a satisfying conclusion at my temporary retirement from live painting at a recent Mary Lattimore + Walt McClements + Michael Garfield show here in Santa Fe.

It's the sequel to my 2017 painting "My Dark Companion" and an exercise in visionary-art-as-science-fiction, paying tribute to Terence McKenna, biologist Michael Levin, and many others.

Here's more info about the piece on Patreon and a picture of it with human creator for size comparison on Instagram.

Oh!  And I'll add:  I still have just over a dozen paintings available, most of them rather large and pricey (but flexibly so).  I also have two kids and all the patience in the world when it comes to paying off an exchange like this, so if you're interested in one of these, let's talk.

NEW MUSIC

Download in lossless audio at Bandcamp 
Save & Follow at Spotify 
Listen at Audius (where artists get 90% of streaming royalties)

Speaking of "the first in over two years," MY GOD how I needed a return to the stage!  Musical performance has been woefully absent from my life over the last two years since my last public gig at Meow Wolf opening for Papadosio in December 2019 — even if you count my asynchronous collaboration with archaeologist Liane Gabora for her research on the paleolithic LΓΆwenmensch sculpture and my livestream with painter Amanda Sage for the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam.

I even got a (pre-show) write-up from the wonderful Adrian Gomez in the Albuquerque Journal!

AND I managed to get some decent concert footage.  Here are two new live concert videos of my philosophy-complex-systems-protest song "Seeing Like A State":


And of my cyberacoustic guitar improvisation, "Wing It":


NEW PODCASTS

And of course I spend most of my time talking to people about important ideas. This last few months has been especially rich and rewarding. Just take a look at these (and then, hopefully, also, listen):






I've dropped these two excellent and soulful sessions as well for Patreon supporters:



MENTIONS

Thanks to Cris Beasley for pushing my Future Fossils episode with Time Loops author Eric Wargo on her incredibly cool and fun Becoming Dragon Substack in a special issue on lucid dreaming.

I am similarly honored that the Plutopia News Network (c/o my friend and low-key living legend Jon Lebkowsky) felt it similarly worthwhile to point people in my direction in THEIR newsletter, alongside the badasses John Coltrane, Bruce Sterling, and Marc Frauenfelder.

NEW MUSIC DISCOVERY PLAYLIST

Lastly, here is a link to the new playlist I'm starting for delicious musical discoveries.  I don't really like Spotify as a company but it's nonetheless still a great place to turn other people on to music I enjoy:


And that's all she wrote.  :)  Thanks for reading!

19 May 2021

There is no path. The path is made by walking.

Traveller, there is no path
The path is made by walking.
Traveller, there is no road
Only wakes in the sea.
– Antonio Machado

Hey, everyone (weary smile). It's Spring, finally, and beautifully so. Some things are starting to feel like The Old Ways again and some never will. I hope this new work finds you well. I talk so much these days, I'll let the work speak for itself this time.

You can watch the time-lapse of my latest digital art explorations on Instagram, where I have also been playing the wonderful Chapman Stick almost every day, writing new short pieces that will fit the narrow format. It's an amazing instrument. It's kind of saving my sanity, lately. Speaking of which:


My most recent article to share with you, the first stabs at an essay for a compilation on the topic:

As artists, our improvisation with the dehumanizing algorithms of predatory surveillance capitalism is a kind of tango — an exploratory, open-ended, provisional, context-dependent, time-bound, blindspot-defined process of mutual adaptation. The economy — and the ecology of which it is a subset of dynamic interwoven agencies — is an evolutionary system, and evolution is improvisation via the appropriation of existing forms. The algorithms we design are just the visible tip of the algorithms we enact unwittingly, the action of distributed intelligence in a long, complex arms race with itself. The only way to win is to refuse the rules and act from true and nameless spontaneity.

Read the whole thing here.


My first concert in months! Freestyle explorations from within a tangled bank of musical electronics, far-out ideas, and intertwingled subjectivity, for your journeying pleasure. Live streamed on 2021.04.18 as part of the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam, hosted and organized by Daniel Shankin, with a special live painting appearance by visionary artist Amanda Sage.

Download it for for free (or for tips) on Bandcamp or Patreon. Watch it on YouTube:


Also on YouTube: the full recordings from our recent Future Fossils Book Club discussions on Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta and Distress by Greg Egan, two of the coolest books I've ever read. We went deep!  I love the scrappy and profound community that has clustered around the conversations we have on the podcast. 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch future book club recordings or become a Patreon supporter to participate in them yourself! Our next call will be on May 30th to talk about Dark Constellations by Pola Olaixarac, and then in June we're getting the author on the call to talk about Eric Wargo's Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self (!).

Meanwhile, excellent Future Fossils episodes continue to trickle out every two weeks:


That's "all" for now. Thank you for reading and for being. Reach out any time. Be well...

Until we meet again, here is where I put all of the cool new music I discover:


And where I sell art prints and original paintings — proceeds go directly to feeding children:




03 November 2020

And Now For Something Completely Different! New Music, Art, Writing, & Talks To Get Your Mind Off The Apocalypse


Hello, beloveds. It takes almost no effort at all to double down on the spookiness of this time of year, so let's at least have some fun with it, zoom out, and let me help remind you of the deeper currents in which we're all swimming with some of the best work I have ever produced.

I am honored to share with you, in this edition of the newsletter:

a new psychedelic folk song it took me over twelve years to write and produce;
a new electronic guitar improvisation I made as part of a peer-reviewed archaeology paper;
the final (?) installment of my essay series on augmented reality and evolutionary arms races;
my presentation on deepfakes for The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks;
— my logo design mockups for the South West Science Writers' Association;
— two excellent Future Fossils episodes on the pro-social and anti-social applications of deepfakes;
— my guest appearance on the delightful Talk of Today podcast; and
— my guest appearance on the equally delightful Plutopia News Happy Hour.

Lastly, as a pure and unadulterated offering, check out the extensive Future Fossils Wavescapes Spotify Playlist I've been secretly brewing for you good people over the last couple months. It's excellent.

I suggest optimizing for synergy by listening to my new tunes while you read the new pieces and then listening to the podcasts while you do whatever urgent work you assuredly have to do right now...

Let these be not bids for your attention but gifts to help lift you into a better state of mind, an invitation to enjoy some highly-polished and substantial treats — nourishment for your mind, heart, and soul.

Thank you and wishing you the best through all the turbulence.

love,
Michael

PS — Here's the jack-o-lantern that I carved this year, because how could I not:


My Crowning Musical Accomplishment:
"You Don't Have To Move" Finally Gets Studio Treatment


Twelve years ago I wrote a song on a trampoline at Burning Man inspired by UFO sightings and apocalyptic dreams I had after getting out of college and watching the plans I'd had for my entire life fall to pieces.

Since then I've carried that song with me and cultivated it across a 30-stop national tour, dozens of festivals on three continents, and half a dozen interstate moves...and it's grown ferns and gemstones, doubled in length, and continued to fold in all of the new guitar techniques I learned along the way to stand as a living record of everything I know about the instrument and how to plug it into electronics and transform it into other things entirely.

Until this year, though, it had no definitive recording. Never made it to the studio — my life just moved too fast. It was the flagship of an album I'd been promising the world for years but then I got a job and had a kid and had to stop the touring, and the timeline kept receding. Seemed like I would never get this done.

And then we all got quarantined for months and suddenly I was back in the saddle with recording — and NEW songs started coming faster than they ever have, and it's now all that I can do to get the old ones finished and the new ones down before the next batch tumble in and add another album to the FOUR that I'm now planning...

It turns out that this song had wisdom in it that I never heeded and I never understood until it came true in my life: that you don't have to go out there to see the world, but if you stay in one place long enough the whole world comes to you. You truly, truly do not have to move.

And so it's with immense excitement I announce today's the day that "You Don't Have To Move" is now complete and published on TIMEWHEEL, an awesome group that I've been eager to contribute to since 2012! With everything else that's been going on this year it's almost hard to savor this accomplishment but this weird autumn flower is a consummation of a lifelong process and a deep delight.

LΓΆwenmensch: The Lion Man
A Cyberacoustic Deep-Time Sojourn

(including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram)

Performed by Michael Garfield for inclusion in an archaeological research project by Liane Gabora and Mike Steel about cross-domain knowledge transfer (how people translate a 40,000-year-old sculpture made in mammoth ivory into modern electronic media). 

The associated video is the best-yet showcase of my "cyberguitar" technique, using the acoustic guitar and hardware pedalboards in a kind of home-brewed modular digital synthesis to dream up a full electroacoustic orchestra with minimal equipment. You can read more about it at Guitar Moderne.

New Essays & Talks on Psychedelic Futurism

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds.


Ignite Talks are five-minute lightning presentations with 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. It’s a fun and challenging format, and my invitation to present one for The Long Now Foundation seemed like a perfect opportunity to distill my thinking on a complex and difficult topic: the rise of AI-assisted forgeries and their social implications.


This week I chat with artist Stephanie Lepp, producer of Infinite Lunchbox, the Reckonings podcast, and — most excitingly, for me — Deep Reckonings, a stunning new project exploring the “pro-social” uses of AI-generated “deepfakes” and other synthetic media for education, therapy, and other beneficial outcomes. In this discussion, we explore how deepfakes can expand and enrich the potent benefits of earlier media like theater and the novel; why it’s so controversial to portray wrongdoers finally accepting accountability and moral leadership, even when it’s an explicit fiction; and how science itself is going to have to change to accommodate a more nuanced and multi-dimensional understanding of truth.


This week I chat with film-maker Michael Morgenstern about his latest transmedia project, I Dared My Best Friend To Ruin My Life, which takes young adults down a mind-bending and immersive narrative vortex about weaponized synthetic media to teach vital 21st Century literacies and the society-threatening implications of #deepfakes — including how synthetic media will turn the logic of waking life from something sober and tangible to something more like a dream or shamanic journey; and the ethical concerns they had to consider and enact in producing something intended to create good but capable of accidentally causing serious harm.


I sit down for a real barnstormer with host Sam Barton to discuss:

• Coronavirus and the epistemic crisis;
• Community and fragmentation;
• Evolution as a multi-billion year remix project;
• Psychedelics as training wheels for transhumanism;
• Restoring democracy, and regenerative communities;
• Rewilding the future; and
• The power of ideas.


"Deepfakes, sensemaking crisis, information warfare, surveillance capitalism, augmented reality - much to talk about! The Plutopia team speaks with our guest Michael Garfield, Community Manager for @longnow and host of the Future Fossils podcast. We'll work on better distribution of the future!"

Vote for My Designs!
South West Science Writers' Association Logo Contest


Vote for me in the Southwest Science Writers Association (SWSWA) Logo Contest! I cherish every opportunity to return to my roots as a scientific illustrator and while the (international) competition is fierce, you can vote as many times as you want. So please do vote more than once, and share this post.

Thank You Burning Man
for Including Future Fossils in Your Official Newsletter!



30 September 2020

Cutting Through: Now with an Even Longer Now & More Creative Service

No point in pretending otherwise: these are dark times. So I hope the treasures that I have to share with you help carve a bright, warm haven in the fear and loathing, and restore a sense of peace and beauty to this otherwise benighted Autumn.


NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR EP


Let's start with some music: twelve minutes of guitar that an executive at my all-time favorite label told me was "a perfect soundtrack for an autumn morning."

Mudras, my new EP of solo fingerstyle guitar tunes, is now live on major streaming platforms. Reviews have been entirely positive; one of my friends, a fabulous guitarist, told me that it made him cry. Maybe 12-minutes of your attention doesn't make even free music exactly "free", but I hope it's the kind of listening that benefits you:


Listen to Mudras EP

I'm also hard at work on The Age of Reunion, the insanely ambitious singer-songwriter album I've been teasing on this blog for over a decade. It's now halfway done (!) and the latest finished track, "You Don't Have To Move", is up on Patreon. Four other songs are up on Bandcamp, where you can listen to them all and pre-order the LP.


NEW LOOP LIBRARY


And for fellow musicians and sound artists, I just released a library of over 300 loops from some of my most inspired improvisations, recorded on tour across three years and three continents. This archive is organized into 65 tempo-matched scenes in a ready-to-jam Ableton Live set, but fans of other audio software can easily lift the WAV files as-is for use in Logic, ProTools, or whatever floats your boat:


NEW PODCAST EPISODES


I've been chipping away at a couple of paintings; you can follow their progress (as well as the drawings I've made in my daughter's first sketchbook and a colorful bouquet of other visual miscellany) on Instagram. But lately, much more of my time has been going into Future Fossils Podcast, which has become a totally reliable font of inspiring conversations with amazing people:


In episode 151 I talk with Jon Marro, one of the purest creative souls I’ve ever had the luck to encounter, about his relationship to time, identity, and purpose, his commitment to service and the creative life, and where he thinks we are in the Big Picture amidst all the chaos and possibility of 02020.


I speak with the ultra-talented, immediately relatable, and immensely likable Colin Frangicetto about what we’ve learned from our high-dose psychedelic experiences, from our extended and potentially crazy periods of constant synchronicity, and from traveling the world playing music and making art.


I talk with Burning Man’s resident philosopher Caveat Magister, anarchist community organizer Naomi Most, and playa trickster historian Mitch Mignano about the festival’s uneasy but remarkable transition into virtuality. We cover everything from complex systems and the evolution of the city, to the unquantifiable value of culture, to the strange ontologies emerging in our screen-bound era.

An excerpt of this conversation's transcript made it up on Lucid News, one of my favorite psychedelic culture mags, as "Can Burning Man Be Replicated Virtually?" Quick and illuminating read.


NEW WRITING & ANIMATION ON "SLEEPING BEAUTIES"


My first long-form article for Long Now, "Sleeping Beauties of Prehistory and the Present Day," explores five new discoveries, in the fossil record and in living organisms, that interrogate the boundary between the living and the dead...

...and, poetically, at the same time I was writing that I was assigned to produce a new animation for the Santa Fe Institute about what Sidney Redner learned from his survey of 110 years of physics papers — and why some scientific discoveries (what Redner calls "sleeping beauties") take so long to get noticed:


I'll part with the friendly reminder to help keep everybody safe with proper face masks. If somehow you've made it all the way to Autumn 02020 without one of these — or you just want to level up your style — check out the four designs I have up at Idea Fab Labs. You can select from head straps (which I like) or ear loops (if that's more your kind of thing) and each contains a pocket for a fancy filter, if you want to take your safety measures all the way: