Attention is our greatest natural resource. [New Stickers | New Music | New Paintings | New Conversations]

Hey friends! Here's the best of what I've been up to for the last month.  

Hope you're staying sane, calm, responsive, loving, and alert...

Feel free to write me any time.  Good luck out there.

love,

Michael

I used to think imagination is our greatest natural resource – until I realized that attention is the upstream, limiting reality. In our distracted, breakneck age, sometimes we need a good reminder to pay more attention to our fleeting lives.

Inspired in part by Aldous Huxley's awesome novel, Island (in which his utopian society trains birds to squawk "Attention!" randomly, reminding citizens of opportunities to be more mindful), these glossy laminated vinyl stickers are so close to indestructible that they will keep inspiring mindfulness for years to come.

This is guerrilla intervention against the mind-eating nonsense of our tech-plutocracy. Concerned too many people live in algorithmic feed-scrolling fugues like thumb-bearing farm animals? Just slap a few around town and sit back marveling as your town becomes more aware!

While I have your attention:

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)

Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)

Spotify (since you're there already)

My sentimental final gig in Austin before relocating to New Mexico was special for more than one reason: long-time musical conspirator and ally Andrew Noble joined me for two days of live performance at the Developer Week Conference. Andrew was a regular at Loopers' Night, the two-year monthly residency that I hosted at Strange Brew, Austin's best small listening room – someone with whom I had developed such a stage rapport, I knew that I could count on him to jump in with me – no rehearsals and no plan – and improvise four hours of killer music.

Most of these two fire days were lost in a recording error – but the music that survived demonstrates something rare and wonderful amidst the sea of mostly-solo tunes in my back catalog: two artists who have played together regularly for a while and learned to follow one another's lead; two voices that contribute to each other, finish one another's sentences, erupt into ecstatic swells and spacious interstices with a trained and listening synchrony.

It's yours to do with as you please – including remix, share, play backwards during rituals, etc.

Same goes for this 17-minute electric guitar instrumental from my performance at EFF-Austin's SXSW party in 2018, fresh on all the streaming platforms (cover art by David Titterington):

Bandcamp (download in any audio format you like)

Feedbands (streaming plants trees, pays in Bitcoin)

Spotify (since you're there already)

And here are the six latest amazing conversations that we've had on Future Fossils Podcast – including the first of three patrons-only book club calls for Liu Cixin's Three Body Problem trilogy:

  

  

I’ve also appeared on a number of other people's podcasts, lately:

The Myths That Make Us, Future Tech Podcast, Tap Iñ, Third Eye Drops, Awake Aware Alive, Mutations...I won't play favorites, but my personal best was probably on display for Artsy AF.

Speaking of being artsy AF, here are two new small paintings I made for my first gallery show in Santa Fe (at Eye on the Mountain).  Both of them are 12"x12" on stretched canvas and available for a crisp Ben Franklin apiece (or its digital equivalent).  Email me if you'd like one or both – I've been hanging them from the corners and they look great on the wall together:

UPCOMING EVENTS

New Painting, Music, & Enamel Pins | Message To Your Future Self | Burning Man Schedule

"Any action can be practiced as an art, as a craft, or as drudgery."

– Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play (p10)

"From the evidence...it seems that feeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive."

– Emily Esfahani Smith

I'm leaving today for Burning Man (schedule below) and will spend the next week collecting interviews and other inspirational content to share with you all...in the meantime, my tireless sharing includes:

• My live painting from Gratifly Music & Arts Festival,

• My deepest, jazziest album of cyberacoustic guitar music to date;

• A new series of crowd-sourced inspirational videos taken through Google Glass;

...as well as some very shiny enamel pins!  I think that's already more than I should try and lay on you at once, but I've always been better at making art than hustling it.  Enjoy, and have a magnificent week!

"Message To Your Future Self" Video Series

I think it's very important to have a conversation about what role Glass (and other vastly more powerful technologies just around the bend) can play in our lives - how to wield these double-edged swords constructively, how to bring the new world into being in ways that maximize its promise and minimize its peril.   I really want us to have a thoughtful conversation about this and welcome your thoughts and feedback by email or publicly on this facebook event page.

My first idea for using Glass to empower and uplift people was to take 10-second videos of everyone who wanted to share their message with the world:

Part 1: Gratifly & Unitus Festivals

Watch in HD on Youtube

Part 2: Rootwire Festival

Watch in HD on Youtube

In the last six years I have given almost all of my work away for free to people out of faith that the most important thing is to help people find meaning and purpose in their lives, not set a price on the value of my time. So please take a moment to check out what I'm doing with Glass and make a contribution to my fundraising campaign if you can.

My New Enamel Pin Collection

Buy the whole set for $50 + s/h or individually: Triceratops | Butterfly | Dragon

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Thanks to The Headspace for their help making this happen!  A little about each design:

"As Awesome As Three Unicorns" (the dinosaur) – Painted at Sonic Bloom in 2012, this piece bridges my two lives as a scientific illustrator and live artist, and ended up in the collection of Mary Jane, the youngest live painter ever, who is also totally awesome. 

"Every Day Is A New Year" (the dragon) – Painted at Rootwire and Art Outside Festivals as well as innumerable other small shows, this piece was my anticipatory portrait of 2013, an homage to the late Terence McKenna, and led to my being selected by Google for their Glass Explorer Program.

"Takes Flight" (the butterfly) – Painted at the MAPS 2010 Psychedelic Science Conference, this piece was inspired by a vision I received in a workshop with Alex & Allyson Grey the day before the event.

A New Album of Oceanic Cyber-Guitar Grooves

Stream/Download it here

Grab "Dance on the Roof" for free on Soundcloud

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I'm rebranding my work as an electroacoustic improvisational instrumentalist to reflect the inherent contradictions in making electronic music on an acoustic guitar – and to tap into the potent relationship I've developed with owl medicine since moving to Austin two years ago.  Here's a little bit about this release and the work to come:

If Michael Garfield can be said to collect anything, it would be great gigs in strange venues – from The Cave Without A Name to the MAPS Psychedelic Science conference, from Black Rock Desert to all four stages in the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. 

Possessed by a passion for the feeling of spaces and determined to translate "vibe" into sound, Michael's increasingly all-improvised acoustic-electronic sets wed house concert intimacy with ravetastic cyberdelia in magical performances that draw down the spirit of a place into music. 

Capturing both past and future in alchemical alloys where fingerpicking and hardware live PA join in soaring transcendental freestyles, this is music as adventurous as the stages on which it's performed. Half Zen calligrapher and half starship captain, Michael Garfield is building a cathedral of sound for our paradoxical Age of Transition. 

Album artwork by Bonnie Goodson.

New Live Painting From Gratifly Festival

Splash!

11" x 17" Prints For Sale Here

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24"x36" - paint markers on masonite

Original available - email me to inquire/offer

Painted live at Gratifly Music and Arts Festival to the music of:
Thriftworks, Gaudi, Papadosio, Kalya Scintilla, The Werks,
Eskmo, Govinda, Desert Dwellers, Akara DJ, Ployd

My Burning Man Schedule

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• Tuesday ("Monday Night"): Center Camp Café

12:45 - 1:30 am: Cyberacoustic Guitar Improv

• Wednesday: Center Camp Café

4:00 - 5:00 pm: "These are the Good Old Days: Reverse Nostalgia from a Citizen of the Future" (talk)

5:30 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar for the Aerial Dance Showcase

• Thursday: Fractal Planet Speaker Series

2:30 - 3:45 pm: Taking A Cosmic Perspective (talk)

7:30 - 8:15 pm: Musical Break - Cyberacoustic Guitar 

• Friday: Palenque Norte Speaker Series

2:00 - 3:00 pm: "The Age of Aquarius & The End of the Cargo Cult" (talk)

• Saturday: Sacred Spaces Village

5:00 - 6:00 pm: Cyberacoustic Guitar in the Grand Hall 

New Collab Painting, Guitar Gear Interview, "Extinct" Video, Custom Hats

"Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress."

– Stephen Jay Gould

“No moving parts in one’s true nature, nothing to break down.”
– Ken Wilber

"Extinct" live at Whip In (feat. Toni Lane Casserly)

Watch/Share at Youtube

Download "Extinct" for free at Bandcamp

I turned 28 this year, on January 8th – a birthday I share with fellow mystic rockers Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking.  Part of my strong association with the Capricorn archetype is what the ancients called "melancholy humor" – a moodiness that draws me inward to reflect on cosmic truths, predisposing me toward science and philosophy, fixing my attention on the profound vistas of the interior landscape.

To celebrate this portentious day – when Saturn (the planet of time, fate, and responsibility) returns to where it was on the day I was born – I played my ode to the inescapable reality of death at the show that night.  "Extinct," originally recorded at last year's Manifestation Celebration next to dinosaur skeletons in the Dallas Natural History Museum, carries the Buddha's tears on its sonic conduits.  It's a reminder that all the life we enjoy is given us by the death that made room for us – that our own transformations are to be welcomed, and black is as holy as green.

It may not seem like a timely message as spring blooms all around us, but when I had to pick a track to go on my friend's recent benefit compilation for Rock Against Cancer, it was the obvious choice.  "Death is the road to awe," as they said in The Fountain – it's half of the mystery of existence, half of our nature, and thus it is to be embraced as we come to know and love everything we are.  Wisdom grows from accepting our limitedness so thoroughly that we move through it into our eternal nature...

Interview With Everyday Guitar Gear

"A transcendent exploration of what one man can achieve with an acoustic guitar...his glitched-out grooves [are] simultaneously calm yet very much switched-on."

- Everyday Guitar Gear

When I tell people I make electronic music on the acoustic guitar, that statement conceals a huge part of the story.  That part looks like this:

Now, anyone who wants a window into my process as an improvisational "cyberacoustic" guitarist can read all about it in this article – where I go into detail about every pedal I use, as well as the inspiration behind my playing and what's it's like for me to do this crazy octopus high-wire act on stage.

“When I pick up my guitar and play, I’m agreeing that this is an instrument, that this is a guitar, that I play the guitar, and that I play the guitar in some specific way. That this is what it’s ‘for.’ There are an infinite number of ways for the universe to express itself through the functional relationship between a human being and a guitar.” (read more)

If you're a musician or freestyler of any kind, you'll dig the conversation...

Maithuna

(a collaboration w/ Chaeli Cardenas)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

Like/Comment/Share on Chaeli's FB
Original painting for sale – inquire by email

Order 11"x17" prints for $15 + $5 s/h

I worked on this painting for weeks at farmer's markets and street fairs in Boulder last summer before throwing up my hands in frustration and handing it over to my friend Chaeli Cardenas to do with as she pleased.  And "as she pleased" turned out to be pretty amazing.

Legend has it that I inspired Chaeli to pick up paint markers at the Shpongle show in Dallas two years ago...and she immediately overtook me with her talent, painting gorgeous animal portraits of depth, sensitivity, and playfulness.  (Do you see the hidden wolf in the painting above?)

All sales of this print are split between me and Chaeli, who just moved down to Austin on a wing and a prayer to start a new artistic life on her own terms...help her follow her bliss!

Hand-Painted Hats

There's still a week or two remaining to preorder one of the amazing embroidered flatbills Grassroots California is making with my design – here's the picture if you haven't seen it – email me if you'd like to buy one directly from the artist before GRC announces their own presale and they're gone for good!

Here is the latest batch of hand-painted custom caps:

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New Article at SolPurpose.com

Another installation in the ongoing series, Ode To A Paradigm Shift, hosted by my good friends at their inspirational media portal SolPurpose.com.  This one's about the secret spirituality inherent in science, and the beautiful humility of our unique place in the universe: "Copernicus & The Sacred Humility of Science"

"Insofar as science is the process of expanding the boundaries of our ignorance, it is a sacred mission of continual decentralization, marginalization, and humbling. But when all is said and done we are in some sense exactly where we started, because we are in the dead (nay, living) center of the human experience, just as we always were. As our technologies allow us to perceive ever-greater celestial objects, they allow us to peer deeper and deeper into the realms of the inconceivably small…but we always seem to remain poised perfectly between these two extremes, precisely in the middle of the human cosmic measure." (read more)

Next Week...

I'd have included tons of pictures and videos from my adventures South By Southwest in this week's news, but don't want to overwhelm anybody any more than I already do.  So stay tuned because sharing everything from SXSW is gonna be a two-parter!

In the meantime, thanks for reading, feel welcome to reach out with questions or comments, and have a magnificent day...

Sacred Activism - Video & Transcript

Watch this video in HD at Youtube or Vimeo

All of the media in this video was composed, produced, and performed by Michael Garfield under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike License and can be downloaded and shared accordingly. (For more information on what the license allows, visit bit.ly/ccbyncsa - I highly recommend these licenses for the publication of your own creative work.)

While all of this is available for free, I do of course love your contributions...money and publicity are easier to transfer via internet than food or physical affection, but I'm open to receiving whatever you have to give. :)

Music - "Touring The Body Electric"
...improvised live cyber-acoustic guitar loopscapes:
bit.ly/​thebodyelectric

Narration - excerpted from "Meeting The Self You Aren't"
...talks on the "shadow" from last fall's evolver.net-sponsored speaking tour:

bit.ly/​meetingtheself
Artwork - timelapse video of "Stun Flower"
...which you can see in hi-res and read all about here:

bit.ly/​sonicbloomart

Sacred Activism

The goal, as I understand it, is to facilitate a really moving, meaningful conversation about the role of the repressed voices in the self and in the society, and to understand what we have to learn from these voices - or, possibly, engage them in a way that we can learn from them - so that we can ride the wave of this transformative crisis that I'm certain everyone in this room recognizes this country, and our species, is currently undergoing.

What I want to talk about is why the "shadow" even exists. To have some part of ourselves that we declare as "not me" is obviously a survival advantage. It keeps us safe from external threat. Or is it the other way around? Is it that we only perceive external threat because of "the other," that when we perceive something as other we are inherently afraid of it.

In a number of communities I've seen this, where people say, "Oh, that's somebody else's shadow...but when it comes time for me to explore my own shadow, I somehow never get around to it. Cuz I'm a pretty well-integrated guy, I mean, after all, I'm like, more in the know than most people, so...I don't really have to worry about it. I tend to be someone who likes to think of things in a positive way. Maybe my attitude alone is gonna change the world. All we gotta do is meditate and the world will be better!"

There's this "Maharishi Effect" that's been measured and demonstrated; you get a certain number of meditators together in a city and it lightens up the crime. Focused intention has this measurable, empirical effect, something that's been supported by research at Princeton and a number of different institutions: that there's something, there's a "Force," we can make disturbances in it...

There's a huge body of literature on this stuff, and it's valid. And that's great. But that doesn't somehow exempt you from actually putting your finger in the mud! That doesn't actually get us out of the duty of activism!

But there's this reasonable concern with activism, which is that it's extremely difficult for one person to bear the suffering of the entire world. How do we deal with that?

What I feel like I'm compelled to communicate is this balance to be found in something that Andrew Harvey calls "sacred activism": that we do our work in the world - I mean, after all, the tenth oxherding picture of Zen is this painting of the guy leading the oxen (which stand for enlightenment) back into the marketplace. Enlightened business is the deepest form of enlightenment, as recognized by Zen. The willingness to pull this eternal understanding into this chaotic, ever-blooming, ever-decaying mess and actually work with it.

Because what else do you have to do? I mean, if you are truly identified with everything, then you have a sense of humor about this stuff. And also, you can't not do this.

But that little bit of distance required for that kind of work really is required. It really does take zooming out. There's something about that film, "The Powers of Ten," that I feel defines our generation. Something about understanding the workings of the world at multiple levels of magnitude and how they all fit together, and how they all resemble one another.

And it's finding ourselves in this cosmic context that frees us from the conventional human dramas just enough - at least in my case, and I recognize that I'm one specific personality type among many - but in my case, understanding my place in the human superorganism, in the multidimensional co-causative matrix of temporal interactions, understanding the place of my species as a tissue in this ecological body and then what role our planet plays in these larger solar and galactic contexts -

(Come to think of it, it's actually kind of crazy that we as human beings have any insight into this whatsoever.)

- thinking about those things lifts me just enough out of my daily bullshit that I feel like I can get into this.

But then on the other end, hearing the tragic stories of the people who have been caught up in this system more than we have really puts it all in perspective. That we're suddenly the average point between these two poles. We recognize the existence of beings far greater than ourselves, beings in which we are participants, just a piece of the flesh of this greater thing. But also, we've got agency and we have choice over so much - so much that so many other people don't have. And I encourage you to linger with that bring-down for a minute: these people who, for no real reason that we can determine, have had their lives completely destroyed.

And so between those two things is the sacred activism. There's enough "face" there that we have a reason to change something. And there's enough distance and enough context and enough of the universal vastness of things that we're not destroyed, we're not completely burnt out by our striving. We're able to participate in these things in some way, being able to hold the sorry and the gravity of the work, and at the same time have a sense of humor about how little we're able to accomplish - because after all, these rocks are like, three billion years old, and I'm...twenty six?

We're pitiful, really. And yet we're so powerful.