"We ask our readers not for belief but for doubt of their infallibility.”
By now most readers of this blog already have a strong opinion about the impact of artificial intelligence on the art world. I've always handled my ambivalence about disruptive new technologies by diving deeper, trying to understand, playing and exploring...I've learned a lot this way, and see it as an integral component of my overall commitment to the complications and complexity of life on Earth. Discomfort is an opportunity for shadow work and curiosity is the antidote to fear.
But it has not been easy: people wrote me hate mail when I beta tested Google Glass; they wrote me hate mail when I minted my first NFTs; and I have similarly caught a lot of flack this year for exploring tools that have a lot of artists justifiably concerned in much the same way that composer John Philip Sousa worried about the economic impact of recorded music. (My friend Michael Jacobs has another, possibly more crucial caution: that, like television, A.I. artwork is a kind of "offshoring" of the human imagination to machines.)
And yet, as someone who has struggled as an artist in an economic system that is outright hostile to the vital work of dreamers, this is just another turn in the ongoing evolution of our synthesis and reconnection with the spirit world as it appears through minerals. (I chatted at some length about this with the legendary Android Jones, another artist I admire for his embrace of every new tool he can get his hands on.)
Those of you who are already members of the Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord Server know it's now a constant conversation in those fora. I feel immensely blessed to have so many people in my circle willing to pursue this inquiry, unflinchingly and with enormous creativity. And I've been sharing all of my own A.I. art experiments with Patreon supporters, and dreaming up new visionary vistas in collaboration with members of the Discord server...there's something special happening here, quite unlike collaborative painting, more like consulting oracles and forming egregores together.
As fast as things are moving in this space, I'm sure that I'll have more to say on all this soon. For now, however, plenty new, exciting news to share — not just about A.I. but also simpler and more obviously soulful human things, like painting with my daughter, making music, and exploring liminality and depth with awesome people on my podcast.
Enjoy, and thanks for tuning in with me:
💅 Future Fossils Gets A Makeover
It's always been my goal to turn this podcast into an umbrella for my work in every medium, and this month I took one big step in that direction with an overdue rebranding. "Future Fossils" is intentionally plurisignative: it points not just to our mortality, to deep time and our role as ancestors-in-training, but to information from the future to which we might be oblivious. It is a speculative fiction game in which we dream up objects from the worlds to come, and a reminder that those speculations will one day feel obsolete, perhaps naïve or foolish. And it's simply fun to say; much like how I have failed to look the part on stage when playing super-trippy music, I have always felt the visual aesthetic of the show fell short in making clear just how intensely psychoactive it can be. Well: FIXED!
Expect some stickers soon, and plenty more to boot. For now, this GIF:
👕 New Clothing, Home, & Auto Collections
Excited to explore the "art director" role with my A.I. experiments in this overdue collab with Acidmath! Pull-over and zippered hoodies, bedding, stairway decals, blankets, tapestries, jigsaw puzzles, rugs, door socks, cloaks, and more are all on offer now to help you rock next season. These are among my favorite of about 10,000 images machines have "dreamt up" at my bidding...just one small slice of four months of obsessive tweaking and discovery in "latent space" — a kind of plenum right next door and full of treasures, horrors, and sublime encounters. Come with me on an adventure into jellyfish metropolis and druid forest temple; play with steampunk insects, flowery dragons, and exotic alien botanicals. New items added all the time!
Quick note: I know I'm not alone in this, but I will say it anyway. This year has been a landslide of surprise expenses and I am immensely grateful for your purchases. If A.I. art is not your thing, I still have plenty of prints and paintings in my store, and would be happy to discuss commissions. Thanks for helping me (for instance) keep my family comfortable by adding heating and AC to our house after two long years without it!
🎬 Collab with Film-Maker Oscar Sharp & GPT-3
…in which I prompt prospective Future Fossils Podcast guest GPT-3 via my delightfully weird friend, visionary film-maker Oscar Sharp, who notably directed Sunspring, the first screenplay written by artificial intelligence. This “conversation” took place in the summer of 2020, while GPT-3 was still in closed beta. In other words, before it became a part of the routine corporate toolkit for replacing call center workers, copywriters, and other white-collar precariates…before DALL-E and Midjourney and Stable Diffusion sent my artist friends into an anxious sweat.
(It was, however, three years AFTER I wrote about what was coming in my novelette An Oral History of The End of ‘Reality’ — which I’ll continue to harp on about like Cassandra until I can “hire” GPT-3 to do it for me with my UBI unemployability dispensation. That day cannot come too soon, because I’d really like to get back to writing and singing songs all the time. Musicians, at least the ones with duende, have long since disabused ourselves of the conceit of economic utility. We know the economy is blind to the labor that matters most. But I digress.)
It gets weird fast. Let’s begin! Read on at Patreon or Medium.
🎨 Collab Paintings with My Three-Year-Old Daughter
Teaching my daughter to paint has been not entirely dissimilar to how I work with A.I.: she's a source of chaos that gives me constraints within which to refine and focus a "random seed." It's been truly and deeply gratifying. Plus, it's been delightful to teach her about how making art isn't just about the intrinsic satisfaction but the (potential) financial rewards. We sold these two paintings to friends and she's earned her first toys for herself, as well as squirreled away her own seed savings.
🎸 New (& Old) Musical Adventures
Also available as an NFT on the Polygon blockchain at Mintsongs.
This is a time-edited 18-minute cut of a 30-minute performance, echoing with the carnival-cathedral atmosphere of this bizarre psychedelic social experiment amidst the oaks of a Lost World in the middle of a high-tech metropolis.
All three tracks feature my beloved Nicole Taylor for a rare guest appearance on viola, which I sampled and remixed into my looping rig with the Boss RC-505. Light some incense and enjoy!
Also available as an NFT on the Polygon blockchain at Mintsongs.
🎧 New Podcast Episodes
This week on the show I chat with the storied, insightful, multidimensional Roland Harwood — a “compulsive connector,” generalist, “failed astronaut,” pianist, Founder, CEO, Trustee, impresario of international collective intelligence projects, and generally fascinating person. In a conversation that already feels somewhat archaeological (it was recorded in November 2021 and references discussions that have already developed significantly over the last year), we explore the martial art of living in transition, of thriving in the in-between spaces, of dealing with the unpredictable and the fundamental uncertainty of our lives. We also rap on the subjects of innovation, global weirding, organizational evolution, technology, hope, and happiness...
✨ Parting Thought:
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