On The Eve of My Most Epic Journey Yet
This blog's been going for over eight years now, and I still think this update is the best I've ever sent. I can't wait for you to see this art! To hear this music! To soak up all these great ideas!
But first I have to tell you about my biggest adventure yet:
A VIRTUAL REALITY TRAVELOGUE OF PORTUGAL. I've been booked to speak and play guitar at Boom Festival (next week!), an internationally-renowned week-long electronic music and visionary art event. This is my first trip to Europe and I want to make it as amazing for you as I can – so I'll be capturing and sharing both my talk and musical performances, as well as interviews and travel shots, in VR-ready full 360º video and spatial audio.
It wasn't cheap but damnit,
there are spiritual rewards to being on the front lines like this.
Read more on my campaign page to learn about my inspiration for this project, and contribute something if you can. But please know, this is not a plea for your support – it is about me giving you and everyone the best I can, and then inviting you to join me in the fun. It is about declaring fearlessly:
The future is already happening just over the horizon, so I'm going to act like we are all supported in our work already. I am going to behave as though the future I believe in is already here. And that means sharing with you joyously, prodigiously, all banners waving. Living as a work of art and knowing there's no need to fear.
I love you and I cannot wait to show you all the beauty I discover on my travels.
But for now, the errands. Hit me up for any reason, as per usual...
Michael
Proudly Presenting My New Album:
Little Bird & The Eschaton
Download/Stream Link
Live electronic improvisations on acoustic guitar and voice, or what I started calling "cyberacoustic guitar" in 2011. These are the most realized and mature performances that I've recorded in the ten years I have consciously been trying to amend the painful absence of this music in the world.
This is musical performance as a sacrament and exploration of the intimacy between human and machine. Between the flesh and wood and steel and digital devices, something else emerges. It's like collaborating with the future, singing anthems of an age in which the human mind and body are remixed into the networked electronic wilderness of planetary culture.
(Hence the title: Little Bird & The Eschaton are pet names for Yours Truly and what Terence McKenna called "the strange attractor at the end of history," drawing all of us into its bosom.)
Note:
You can also listen to these tunes on Spotify (Because even though paying
them to listen to me isn't as good as paying
me to listen to me, you already paid them, so it's moot; and who am I to stop you from enjoying music that I love and want you to enjoy?)
Three New Live Paintings
40"x30" – paint pens on canvas
The word "chreode" was coined in the 20th Century to mean the path a cell takes on its way to differentiation as part of a specialized organ – but I first encountered it in
the trialogues between Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham, and Rupert Sheldrake, in its expanded sense as a channel in the landscape of potential futures, a path of likely action in a field of possibility. A chreode is the tributary system through which we flow mostly unaware, like water down the side of a hill; it's the invisible geography in which we are embedded, the plastic medium that every action subtly reshapes, each moment of our lives constrained by all our past decisions. We all take a different course, but we're all rolling down the golden thread of destiny to meet each other in the ocean...
Original piece painted at the Highberry Music Festival on July 1-2 to the music of John Wayne & The Pain, Wookiefoot, Papadosio, Kaminanda, Cornmeal, Yonder Mountain String Band, TAUK, Desert Dwellers – and "in studio" (while traveling through Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas) from July 5-19 (finished on the Full Moon).
20"x20" – paint pens on canvas
What we think of as technology today is very limited: just, mostly, metal tools and implements. But language is technology. A lot of soft and squishy things are, too. And as society evolves to keep pace with accelerating change, our tools will speed up too, and liquefy, no longer merely rocks but flowing substances that live and breathe and change as rapidly as we require of them. Think of the black ooze in Prometheus, the über-tech that isn't merely one thing but a process of becoming, an accelerant to evolution. We are moving out of nouns and into verbs, from things to actions. This will be obscene to many – living tools will trigger the disgust of sanitation-crazy modern minds – but in that monstrousness is something luminous and beautiful (to "demonstrate" is to reveal what lies within, the "monsters" merely the repressed angelic forms of our unconscious mind). Enjoy the glistening, metamorphic future and its violet psychofluids...
Original piece painted with oil & acrylic paint pens at the Highberry Music Festival on June 30th to the music of Magic Beans, Dopapod, and Buckethead.
40"x30" – paint pens on canvas
This one is dedicated to Randal Roberts, Kaliptus Ohm, and Jack Shure - three fantastic painters whose influence is clearly felt in this alien still life, first "xenoscape" in a planned series, inspired by the ineffable neither-alive-nor-dead extraterrestrial "Hypotheticals" from Robert Charles Wilson's Spin/Axis/Vortex science fiction trilogy. I spend a lot of time thinking about how people are also places are also things and around we go, each one of us a location, an ecosystem, a mostly vegetative bio-intelligence more ancient and bizarre than we let on...
Original piece painted at the Switchboard South Music Festival in Houston, Texas on 26 & 27 June, 2016 to innumerable 15-minute live band concerts by emerging artists.
My First Live Art Videocast!
I webcast a live painting session and tutorial last week on the
Acidmath'd Facebook Page – even though I've talked about
this very thing for years, somehow I'd never actually done one. It was extremely fun.
If you would like to know how I bring a piece together with paint markers, what I think about while painting, or how awkward I can be when talking to a faceless audience, then look no further:
New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes
My buddy Evan Snyder and I host the
Future Fossils Podcast, in which we try to help folks take a wider view of things. The premise is this: it is a fact of math our greatest audience is yet unborn, and so these conversations may one day become an artifact of interest to future archeologists. What do we believe is worth communicating down the halls of time?
We have some amazing guests to offer their perspectives to the digital museum. Here are author Tony Vigorito and space scientist Bruce Damer's interviews, in which we wonder out loud about synchronicity (Is it for real, or a hallucination?) and wax eloquently of our species' need to organize around Great Projects that inspire us to work together on a common dream...
(iTunes and Stitcher syndication coming soon, we promise! In the meantime,
here's our FB Group.)
Upcoming Things & Stuff
A Final Thought
“There’s not the future, there’s a future. Every single living being has a different future. There are billions of futures and that’s just right now. And now it’s already gone and there’s another one. It’s a deeply responsible job to choose to be creative.”
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