Navigating Radical Uncertainty & Making Art: Vital Conversations • Metamodern Weirdness • Digital Community • Biomechanical Easter Eggs

Hi Friends,

I hope you’re holding up through everything. A quarantine, you know, is from the Italian for “forty days” — that’s how long you had to sit there on the boat before debarking. Whatever brave new world awaits us must be really something, seeing as we blew past forty days a while ago…

I’ve already said my piece about how this crisis might help us find new and better answers than the ones we all got stuck on. Now, deeper into it, I’m just trying to help where I am able. That looks like starting some new (very modest) digital community initiatives, talking sense to crazy when I can, being present as a father and a partner, finding time to play guitar, keeping my head on straight…

The tiny devil on my shoulder tells me to remind you I have art for sale, and that you’ve never had a better opportunity to scoop up one of my originals (because the prices seem imaginary to me, now, and wouldn’t they look better on a wall than in a closet?). The tiny angel on my shoulder tells me I should give as much of it away as possible. I’ll do my best to find a compromise.

Don’t hesitate to write.

Love,

Michael

Music • Paintings • Essays • Talks

New Painting: “A Very Giger Easter”

Here I am before the inevitable quarantine buzz-cut showing off a new 30”x15” canvas I’ve been chipping away at here and there for a couple months. In contrast the rapid start-to-finish I’m used to from live painting, sometimes a piece at home will live in a kind of untouched half-done limbo for weeks at a time…and it feels good to linger and really contemplate that next step, like playing chess by mail.

This piece was one of those. Very nearly called it “My two-thousand-dollar-a-day Fabergé egg habit,” in honor of the great Bleeding Gums Murphy. Here it is head-on:

More close-up pictures on my Instagram.

It’s one of about two dozen pieces that I have for sale right now, and you can pretty much ignore the prices in my master list and make a “Crazy Eddie’s Fireworks” offer. My place is (REALLY) small and I’d rather see these pieces find a good home.

Help Navigating Radical Uncertainty

I feel weird talking about my day job in this newsletter, but it wouldn’t seem like an honest accounting of my creative work without letting you know about Complexity Podcast, the show I host and produce for the Santa Fe Institute.

SFI is the mothership of complex systems research, and for the last six weeks I’ve been lucky to work directly with our president David Krakauer — a brilliant evolutionary biologist whose work has inspired much of my thinking and writing — on a special mini-series exploring on how to navigate the radical uncertainty of our global crisis. (I’m especially fond of this one on surviving a mass extinction and/or market collapse.)

I’ve learned volumes doing this show and these episodes in particular, and it’s been immensely rewarding to know that these podcasts have been helpful to so many people at a time when things don’t make a ton of sense. I hope you find them helpful, too.

Join Our New Discord Server

Lately I’ve felt like social media is an ocean full of sharks and I’d rather just hang out in a cozy lagoon with a few close friends. Also, it feels like this pandemic hit the human species in our weak spot — namely, the civic life, the clubs and neighborhood communities that were eaten by the state and corporations in the last few decades.

If you would like a smaller, less diluted scene, I hope you’ll join us on our Discord server, maybe even hop on one of our ongoing Sunday video calls. I am amazed and humbled by the badasses Future Fossils Podcast has attracted to my life, and it would be awesome if you got to meet them, too.

New Future Fossils Episodes

Episode 142 is a conversation with one of my favorite fiction authors, Alex Shakar, about the profound darkbright bizarritude he channels through his two visionary satirical novels The Savage Girl and Luminarium — two works that show the möbius strip of sacred and profane, futurity and timelessness. We bounce off a long list of paradoxical domains, including saving the world with consumerism, metamodernism, ironic religion, virtuality, neurotheology, trauma and radical meaninglessness, the military entertainment complex, hikikomori, and zen comedy…

Episode 143 is a conversation with documentary film-maker Sanjay Rawal about his profound and inspiring movie, 3100: Run and Become — which explores the spiritual practice of long-distance running around the world, from the American Southwest, to the Kalahari Desert, to a remote mountain monastery in Japan. We discuss how Sri Chinmoy (a student of Sri Aurobindo, the founder of integral yoga), started the 3100 mile race in New York, and what it has become; how to be a documentary film-maker without engaging in cultural appropriation; endurance running as an integral yoga and an act of spiritual service; exertion as its own reward; and how ultradistance running and other endurance sports close the gender gap. This was literally a moving conversation for me — after talking with Sanjay, I put on my shoes and went for a run. I hope it does the same for you.

Episode 144 is a trialogue with film-makers Monica Long Ross and Clayton Brown about their bizarre and wonderful documentary, We Believe in Dinosaurs — and how a creationist amusement park in Kentucky provides a lens through which to examine the tense relationship between science, religion, and business in America. This is a conversation about what happens when premodern, modern, and postmodern worldviews duke it out on a landscape of rapid change for which none of them are sufficient. It’s about the surreal Young-Earth dinosaur museums of Late Capitalism. And it’s about our trust (or lack of trust), and where we put it when we lose the plot.

Go Deeper

Making Sense of the Pandemic • Free Coloring Book • New Music & Paintings

"The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.” 

– Lewis Thomas

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems, and Creative Opportunity

While in enforced isolation due to a plague, college student Isaac Newton devised our modern theories of both optics and gravity. What will YOU do with your social distancing?

This opportunity for a new creative chapter is upon us at all levels, right now. Our national and global systems were stuck on suboptimal solutions and have demonstrated their inability to handle the complex and evolving crises of our emerging planetary culture. We now have a chance to break out, dream up local answers in massive parallel, and come back together in a stronger, more resilient (and antifragile) place than where we started.

Here's a short audio essay on how to make sense of this in light of complex systems research, with dozens of links to useful information in the show notes. Hope it helps.

For those of you with a sudden surplus of free time, I've decided to freeware the previously patrons-only Future Fossils Coloring Book for your enjoyment. It's a 25-page PDF of trippy doodles (some abstract, some of a natural history persuasion) that you can print out or color on a tablet. My only request is that I get to see some of the finished results!

If you want the "full experience," here are hours and hours of free music for your streaming pleasure, with a confirmed track record of facilitating awesome art sessions:

Spotify • Bandcamp • Soundcloud (fewer tracks there compared to the other two)

And now onto some new art!

I painted the top two pieces in collaboration with Jamie Baldwin Gaviola (@flowstatepaint on Instagram). She started the top two and mailed them to me to finish, and then I had a wild hair to "breed" the two paintings. My daughter had her first birthday this week and in the weeks leading up, the two paintings Jamie started seemed reminiscent to me of my partner (the softer pastel sunburst grid one) and myself (the edgier and bolder peacock circuitboard one). The third painting, the square of blobby motion and expressive dynamic gooeyness in the middle, is unquestionably our child.

But of course no symbol can be contained by a single interpretation, even for one (honest) person, and as with all artwork, new layers and associations will undoubtedly reveal themselves over time.  The "daughter" painting was finished the night I also completed a new studio arrangement of a song I've been kind of "pregnant" with for the last several years, a song that first started taking shape the week my partner moved to Austin to live with me in 2014 and I got lost in the Texas Hill Country on ayahuasca (but that's another story). That song, "Always Catching Up," has a lot to do with the network latencies in our nervous systems and how we're always responding to a state of the world that has already transformed into something else. 

When I first played the scratch mix of the studio track for my friends in Santa Fe, the only visible star turned out to be Aldebaran, which is associated with the Archangel Michael and with militant peacocking. It seemed like I was being drawn back into the synchronicity vortex that subsumed me for over a month in 2017 leading up to the release of the Pavo LP & Martian Arts EP (I talk a little bit about that particular Chapel Perilous in the public liner notes to those two releases). Anyway, the latest canvas finished itself that night, and now here we are.

All three of these paintings are available for sale, or if you're playing it safe with your money still want a copy, they're available as cardstock and canvas prints in my shop (Jamie and I split proceeds).

Peacock Circuitboard: Prints & Original

Sunrise Grid: Prints & Original

Aldebaran: Prints & Original

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

Rock Out! New Art & Merch, Music for MDMA Therapy, and Robot Love

It's almost April!  Subscribe to me on Patreon before this Sunday and you're on the list to get my first psychedelic coloring book PDF when it comes out next week.  You'll also get 27 other patrons-only posts, early and exclusive episodes of Future Fossils Podcast, my uncut (deeply psychedelic) interview with Visionary Art Australia, and an increasing share of the time I used to spend on Facebook, shouting into an abyss.

If, like me, you're kind of underwater with your money right now – I still hope that I can welcome you into some awesome conversations that inspire and enlighten.  If you are still using Facebook, join the Future Fossils Facebook group – there are 1100 of us in there sharing links about the future, awesome art, amazing science, deep thoughts, and hilarious asides.  It's where I share most of the cool news that I find, these days...

Thank you so much for staying with me as we grow and change.  And now on to the show!

Rock Out!  (Fighting Rooster)

18"x24" – 2018 – paint pens on canvas

order prints

printed items (iPhone cases, stickers, tapestries, etc.)

like/comment/share on Facebook

A memorial from 2018 (Year of the Earth Dog in the Chinese calendar) looking back on 2017 (Year of the Fire Rooster) and last year's massive rooster painting, this piece sums up how it feels to me like creativity and raw belligerence so often go together – passion, fire, spirit, drive – to make is to destroy what was. Sometimes you just can't tell the difference between a fight and making love...

HD downloads now on Bandcamp

Also available for streaming on:

Spotify • Apple Music • Amazon • Google Play

Last month I played a benefit for Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) at the home of Aubrey Marcus to help raise funds for the Phase 3 FDA-approved clinical trials for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

These new clinical protocols are the most successful PTSD intervention known to science, more than four times as effective as antidepressants, and they don't require a lifetime of medication. These are CURES, not treatments.  And in our anxious age of overstimulation and emotional bombardment, this is more necessary than it's ever been.

I'm honored to have music in the therapeutic playlists for these trials, thanks to the endorsement of my friend and MAPS clinician Saj Razvi.  I'm also working on MAPS to release these playlists to the public. But for now, here is an half-hour excerpt from the instrumental set I played last month...

Enjoy, and let me know if any of this makes it into your own therapeutic playlists!

This week’s guest is independent culture critic John David Ebert – mythologist, philosopher, art historian, and author of twenty-six books.  We talk about the rich mythological references of Blade Runner 2049 in light of the larger – and very urgent – matter of mechanizing human reproduction and the (actually rather ancient) male quest to appropriate the mysteries of the goddess…

This week we chat with the philosopher and sociologist John Danaher about the book Robot Sex: Social & Ethical Implications, a fascinating collection of academic articles on our sexbot future he just co-edited with Neil McArthur. Chances are good you’ve seen the “Don’t Date Robots!” public service announcement from the cartoon Futurama, and probably Björk’s “All Is Full of Love” music video. Maybe you’ve seen Heror Ex Machina or Spielberg’s AI. And let’s not forget the Femmebots in Austin Powers. But does any of this media, for or against, paint a realistic portrait of the impact of machines on human intimacy?

That's 50% OR MORE off any of the pieces you see here.  I'm taking an indefinite hiatus from live painting, so the picking's only getting slimmer...but I'm happy to take far less than the asking price if something speaks to you.  Check out the pieces I have left here, then just send an email with an offer, and I'll let you know within a day.

And last, here are a couple things I'm doing soon that you might like to know about:

Thanks again for reading and have a most blessed couple weeks!

“I think it is misplaced to argue for doing fundamental research just because of its technological spinoffs. Our current standard of living vitally depends on the curiosity-driven research that was done a generation or two before…the most important things that we know fifty years from now will be things we have no idea about right now.” 

– Lawrence Krauss

We Begin 2018 with 1 Huge Collab + 14 Tiny Paintings + 3 Podcasts + 7 Digital Time-Lapses + 1 New Crypto Newsletter

Happy New Year, everyone!  I hope your 2017 wrapped up with beauty, warmth, and generosity, and that your 2018 launched with peace and inspiration.

Updates For People Who Like To Read

I've spent the last month going hard on mostly-secret upgrades, just grinding on a bunch of overdue developments – including daily painting, learning how to paint digitally on a tablet, teaching myself to use a laser cutter, taping awesome conversations for Future Fossils Podcast, and immersing myself in the flood of news on distributed ledger technology (including Bitcoin and over 1000 other projects) and its potential to transform society.  

Now that we're watching evolution in real-time as it transforms society, it feels like time to put my evolutionary insights into practice and help make some sense of where we're headed.  Mapmaking's an art, and art has always felt like mapmaking to me.  (I hope the maps I make and share with you are useful and empowering!  What else would you like mapped?)

I'm also tinkering away at my first studio recordings in too long...the first new tunes will be on Patreon and Bandcamp before you know it.

So!  Some quick links – and then tons of new art and recommended listening:

ALL Poster Prints & Original Paintings PERMANENTLY Discounted

From now on, all of my 11"x17" posters are $15 instead of $20.  I've also permanently lowered prices on all original work.  I'm doing well enough and know that my art could be more affordable and easier to share.  I hope this helps you out!  Browse years of paintings here.

Crypto Reader Weekly Emails

Starting a weekly new email list to share digests of the most interesting links I find on cryptocurrencies and the future of a planetary digital society powered by distributed ledgers and other decentralized technologies.  Sign up here if that sounds interesting to you!

Coloring Book Pages & Digital Painting Time-Lapses

Posting numerous new time-lapse videos of my experiments in iPad's Procreate art app on Instagram.  Watch me discover a new way to render hyperspace!

Watch on YouTube

New Paintings!

Codex/Gnosis (or, The Magic of Reading)

36"x48" – oil and acrylic paint on gallery-wrapped canvas

Just polished off this new collab with Elliot Rogers & William Allan Ross, two of the coolest dudes I know in Austin.  This piece has been an epic journey, and to our surprise and wonder was given props on social media by Raja Ram of Shpongle AND the Dead & Company tour page.  

(We'll have canvas prints soon, signed and numbered in a couple different sizes.  Let me know if you would like me to send details on that, when they're ready.)

Check out my feed on Instagram for plenty of close-ups and shots of it in progress...

Here are a bunch of tiny paintings that I made – the first six 9"x12"s, the last eight 8"x10"s.  I plan to make a ton of these if you would like to order one ($120, s/h included).  Some of these are still available; some have already found new homes as gifts.  Click any of them for a closer look:

   

  

   

   

New Podcast Episodes!

This week I sit down with Jennifer Sodini (EvolveAndAscend.com) and Michael Phillip (Third Eye Drops Podcast) to cut through the technical jargon and discuss the economic, cultural, and even spiritual implications of blockchain technology.

Everything we took for granted is about to change…beyond Bitcoin and quick riches, there’s a new planetary culture based on the scalability of trust. This podcast explores what that means for you – and why so many of your friends think that this new evolution of digital money and contracts is one of the most important events of our lives.

This week – in a brazen display of anachronism – original Future Fossils cohost, electronic music producer, and sci fi aficionado Evan Snyder and I go deep on what we liked and disliked about Alien: Covenant, and speculate on how this film fits into the still-murky larger mythos of Ridley Scott’s expanded Alien universe. We get into atheist Scott’s weird fixation with the Bible; how the Alien films represent and handle philosophical questions about the relationship between humanity and technology; and why people from the science-fictional future ARE SO DAMN STUPID.

This week’s guest is my friend from college, painter David Titterington. He introduced me to Buddhism AND Gender Studies; paints extraordinary, sometimes-macabre landscapes you might call “trans-realist”; and teaches at Haskell Indian University in Lawrence, Kansas (thus has some interesting angles on the intersection of white and indigenous culture).

COME PARTY WITH ME!

Parting Thoughts

“I’ve heard that the dirtiest place in a Catholic Church is the holy water, because all these people are putting their hands in it. The new paradigm is that bacteria’s good and that strong immune systems are built by eating dirt. And maybe, the people that went to church survive, not because they’re in touch with some deity that’s protecting them, but because they’re in touch with each other’s a**holes! Even if it’s a church that doesn’t use holy water, you’re still in the same small room, breathing the same air, sharing bacteria that way.”

– David Titterington