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:
— my logo design mockups for the South West Science Writers' Association;
— my guest appearance on the delightful
Talk of Today podcast; and
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.
Löwenmensch: 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!
