A.I. Art Eruption: The Wildest Period of My Art Career is Right Now (Plus New Music, Podcasts, Public Talks, & Thoughts on Human-Tech Co-Evolution)

I finally surrender to letting these roughly-monthly updates be a magazine unto themselves. This one is about a very hot topic right now: the explosion of A.I.-assisted artwork that you've surely seen sprouting up all over the Web, and my experimentation with it. I've always believed that the future would empower "professional dreamers" to share their inner worlds instantaneously, and it feels like that vision is finally substantiating itself in our waking world. But not all is rosy in this magical future, and I'm honored to help act as psychopomp on the River of Souls we're crossing together as these new tools mature and transform society.

But first, an announcement for the thousands of you in my active online fora:

✨ Big Changes for Future Fossils!

After years of volunteering dozens of hours a week in a patrons-only Facebook group and Discord server mostly populated by free riders, I'm finally clearing out the non-patrons and restoring some focus and sanctity to the community we've built together. Spending so much time moderating non-subscribers has been taking time away from podcast production and my family, but I also don't have the heart to just nuke this group. If you'd like to stay involved please consider signing up for at least $2 a month for the part-time job it is to curate and moderate this group.

Let me clarify that old close friends, former guests of the show, and other people who routinely and consistently add value to this group are welcome to remain regardless of whether you're contributing financially. There are many ways to do this, so if you're broke but interested in staying involved please respond to me privately.

✨ There Is No One Path Forward: Pluralism in Science, Philosophy, & Art

A digestible, albeit light-speed, six-minute-and-forty-second talk on the virtues of and need for pluralism, presented at Creative Santa Fe's Pecha Kucha Talks last month. 

You can find their (audio-and-slides-only) presentation on the Pecha Kucha website, or find my own video recording and extensive supplementary notes and resources on Patreon.

Abstract:

Biodiversity is the measure of ecological health. Cognitive diversity is the secret to innovation and effective collaboration. And contrary to popular belief, there will never be one Theory of Everything to unify all of human knowledge in an equation that fits on a t-shirt. Multiplicity is how the cosmos knows itself, because all models of the world — whether they take the form of intellectual theories or organisms in an ongoing dance of adaptation with their environment — are partial, incomplete, and provisional. Every statement of truth is a conjecture based on limited information, conditioned by a specific history, and ultimately up for revision. Even the myriad standards by which we settle on satisfactory explanations are in tension and conflict with each other — and that's a good thing, because unanimous agreement results in brittle, easily disrupted strategies. If humankind stands any chance of navigating the immensely complex challenges we face, it's time for us to jettison the notion that there's One Idea To Rule Them All, and fan out into "The Adjacent Possible," covering as much ground as we can to search the space of what could be more comprehensively.

✨ AI Art Experiments Stash

Lately I've kind of lost myself in the rapture of exploring text-to-image AI art prompts on the invite-only platform Midjourney, which is (at least in some respects) considerably more advanced than similar apps like NightCafé and Wombo Dream.

Part of this is my lifelong commitment to guinea-pigging myself with new creative tools, starting with my immersion into Google Glass and the resultant contemplation on the co-evolution of surveillance technologies and the self (see essay parts 1, 2, 3, 4). Exploring AI-assisted mass production of works that would, just two years ago, have each taken 20-50 hours to paint...well, I'm hardly the only artist that feels drawn into this as a necessary precursor to navigating the disruption of the creative sector by these tools.

In the meantime, I want to give patrons exclusive access to my curated "dream stream" of Midjourney experiments — feel free to download any of these images you like for personal use: wallpapers, desktops, one-off pillow/t-shirt printing, whatever floats your boat.

Here are some of the most exciting images to have emerged from AI "latent space" lately:

✨ Podcasts on AI, Art, and Philosophy

The above experiments have led to a whole series of fantastic conversations on the direction things are moving, how it connects to ancient esoteric practices, the labor market implications, and how I'm engaging with the mysterious Other through these tools.  Here are three solid recordings on this and related topics:

But of course it also raises deep philosophical issues, like those I recently discussed on The Jim Rutt Show with Jim and my friend and frequent Future Fossils guest J.F. Martel — questions of what art even is, whether sentience is required, what if anything is uniquely human, and how different art might be in another few years' time. I recommend digging into that discussion — and staying tuned for more, because this is a conversation I consider very squarely in the Future Fossils wheel house, and more urgent than most people seem to realize.

One conversation wasn't enough so I ALSO just appeared on my friend Michael Phillip's show Third Eye Drops to talk about Google engineer Blake Lemoine's claims of AI sentience and machine ensoulment, labor market disruptions from new creative tools like Midjourney, and what it's like to "breed" images straight out of the ethers of the imagination.

From Shane's show notes: "In this episode, I catch up with my good friend, Michael Garfield. Michael is the host of the Future Fossils podcast and the Complexity podcast. In his 4th appearance on Here We Are, we discuss topics like fatherhood, lifestyle changes, and the ever-changing world we live in."

✨ Recommended Resources on Human-Technology Egregores

I recently got into a very deep and intense conversation with Carnegie Mellon/SFI Professor Simon DeDeo during his latest visit to the Santa Fe Institute campus. (Check out his talk and my Twitter coverage of it, which I found equal parts nightmarish and utterly inspiring.)

Most of that two hours was spent in roundtable discussion with him and our 2022 cohort of Undergraduate Complexity Researchers, making for the most exciting opportunity I've ever had at work to blow the minds of a bunch of awesome, brilliant twenty-somethings.

Here is the epic mind-dump I sent them afterward, collecting resources that came to mind during our rap session. If you've been following the show for a while you've probably heard me bring most of these up at one point or another, but I'm happy to share them all in one place.

I apologize in advance for what my buddy Mitch Mignano would call an "ecodelic avalanche." Enjoy either spending the rest of time getting around to this or immediately binning it all to preserve your mental health!

(Album cover is from my ongoing series of AI art experiments with Midjourney, which as mentioned above I'm archiving for the personal use of my patrons.)

✨ New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Listen/Subscribe here.

Listen/Subscribe here.

✨ New Music: Live at the West China Tea House (Austin, Texas 2022.05.28)

Member-exclusive HD download on Patreon or Bandcamp.

On the musical front, here's an intimate "storyteller" format acoustic and electroacoustic concert spanning fourteen years of songwriting, with some teahouse-specific improvisations to accompany gong fu tea ceremony. This was my first show in Austin, Texas in nearly four years, a very emotionally intense reunion with old friends and the land I love and once called home. Big thanks to So Han Fan and Nate Bell at the West China Tea House for making space for me to play a family-friendly concert (you can hear my kids screaming throughout) and for the live Future Fossils Podcast I taped there in between sets with Kevin Welch and David Hensley of EFF-Austin!

(If you want a blast from the past (or into the future?), I played one of my favorite late-night instrumental sets at their pop-up tea house at Utopia Festival back in 2017, when they were still called the Guan Yin Tea House.)

Lastly, for now, here's a link to my ever-growing Spotify playlist of new music discoveries and old favorites. I've been keeping and cultivating this for three years now, and it's EXTENSIVE, over 37 hours long. Enjoy!:

Autumnal Cornucopia: The Infoboros • New Zelda Song • Carbon-Neutral NFT Future Fossils • Podcast Tour • Back at Meow Wolf Soon!

Thanks for reading! I am trying to get back more, but shorter, more digestible emails...but that means catching up first with a major info-dump. (It's my love language!) Hope your upgrades have been and continue to be mostly pleasant, and that you find something in here that hits the spot. Write back any time...

New Book Cover & Future Fossils NFT Collection

The brilliant Vidur Mishra, gifted undergraduate student of my mentor Richard Doyle, just wrote his first book and it is one hell of a debut. The Infoboros: Recursion Across Mind, Matter, and Information blends neuroscience, yoga and meditation, and information theory together into a mind-altering ride on the nature of consciousness and what to notice about it.

I feel very lucky to have done the cover for this book. The commission sparked my passion for photomanipulation art, and got me deep in some awesome apps that have become my go-to flowstate protocols when it's too late at night for me to mess with paint or music. And of course, the honor of doing the cover for a book this good...

It's also my first NFT (non-fungible token, a unique digital instance of a work of art, minted on a blockchain) at the carbon-neutral digital art marketplace Voice.com, which I've been following with interest since 2018, well before it launched. I like that they want to make it as easy as can be for artists to produce collections and for people unfamiliar with cryptocurrencies to collect art without having to understand the infrastructure.

And making 1-of-1 "official" versions of each work, in addition to paper and canvas prints, makes me feel like I can recognize my finished products as unique, like paintings, even though the art is easy to mechanically reproduce (although it's worth noting that my NFTs use JPGs orders of magnitude more detailed than what anyone will find online...and that the real utility of NFTs has less to do with owning an art file and more to do with what else having a verifiable on-chain identity opens up — for instance, I can send new works to people who've acquired older ones, or grant them special access to decentralized communities or projects...I'll be writing more about this soon).

Here is more info on the book:

And here is where you'll find the NFT for this piece, and paper or canvas prints.

(I was pleased to learn that Voice promoted my work and this piece in a recent sponsored feature at Gothamist, a New York culture mag with nearly 1M Twitter followers...)

Also on Voice: FINALLY, the series of digital portals I've been diving into, rendered as unique digital collectibles with psychedelic scifi microfictions for each piece (which you can read there). I've always imagined "Future Fossils" as literal objects, time traveling messages from the future, kind of like reverse time capsules. Having, finally, the right place to enact this concept in a series, I'm reveling in the trippy glimpses of "the" future that each one invokes for me, and captioning them in that way...

I'm doing prints for these as well — but nonthelesss believe displaying the 9K-pixel-wide NFT version on a huge solar-powered OLED screen would be impressive.

Find the NFTs and read the microfictions here.

New Song About The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

And then there's this. Sometimes a song just overtakes me and writes itself in minutes. This is one of those. I love it and the people whom I've shown this demo take have ROFLed. Patreon supporters can expect more stuff like this — I'm writing music far, far faster than I can produce definitive recordings, and it seems to me that the best way to honor my undying songbird muse is to just slap these out as rapidly as possible, and loop back when I can. If that sounds fun to you, hop on board and let's do this:

New Podcast Episodes

This show has been quite satisfying for me, lately, as a host. The quality of conversation — the amount of heart and presence, the grace with which we engage in deep stuff with well-balanced levity — has been nourishing.  The latest two are no exceptions:

The Future Fossils Book Club Is Back!

As of this week, all three authors have agreed to be on the show. As always, Patreon supporters at all levels are welcome...and I will set up channels for asynchronous group discussion in the Future Fossils Discord Server so we can yarn together about these both before and after the actual live calls. By all means, start reading whenever you like, but I'll be active in the channels in the order I can actually get to these books, starting with Civilized To Death, and will treat these discussions as crowd-sourced notes in preparation for the episodes.

2021 Podcast Tour

I've also been on a lot of other people's amazing podcasts lately, for which I am grateful. A very diverse set of conversations spanning leadership, spiritual inquiry, creative work, sustainability, and much more. I know time is limited but let me know if you would like me to refer you to just one of them in address to a given living question in your heart:

"For episode 33, Layman [Pascal] is joined by Michael Garfield for a stroll along the highlands of weirdness. Ostensibly orbiting Michael's Complexity and Future Fossils podcasts, and his work for the Santa Fe Institute, they riff on the four types of individuals who channel creativity into society; the difficulty of translating novel insights down in the marketplace; ontological pluralism; 'pace layers' in social and artistic transformation; UFOs; Pepe the Frog, cunnilingus, and neo-Shamanic symbology; alternative voting systems and maximizing collective intelligence; dinosaurs; transhumanism, the bicameral mind, and alien modes of consciousness; tantra; retro-causation; the hummingbird at the edge of time; and -- well, frankly, Layman finally found a guest and conversation partner that out-taxed my powers of summary .... Just hop in, strap on, and see for yourself."

"We talk on everything from free will, to the future of civilization; from incentivizing integration over innovation, to staying childlike into adulthood in order to adapt to the disruptive economy we've created. If you like deep thinking, fractal conversation, you will one-hundred-percent-love this episode. Thanks and shouts to Michael for all the insight and good humor he brought to this episode!"

I'm honored to be a grantee of this rad project Idea Market, which seeks to fix the vital problems of mass media reputation market and fact factories. This conversation with founder Mike Elias and co-host James Ellis (also of Hermitix) was extremely fun.

"Discussed: Time-space synesthesia; Corporatization of the natural; 'The incentive structures of society are misaligned with the incentives of individuals'; Scaling laws of life and society; Be open to the unknown or perish; Tokenization of everything and the inability to quantify value; 'Story is the active ingredient in epistemology'; 'The truth owes you jack'; The Century of the Self & why values are more important than incentives; 'I'll probably ruin your entire company'; the need for dissenters...

"Our conversation explored the need for generalists in a highly specialised world and interdisciplinarity, including the following questions: What is the purpose of polymaths? Why is neuroplasticity is the best antidote to uncertainty and complexity? What is the nature of the technological and evolutionary transition we are in right now? Why would we want to live in the future versus the long now?"

"We explore how humans have been evolving with technology, what happens when innovation becomes the problem, and how we can best navigate societal collapse. It's a nourishing buffet of optimistic outlooks and critical evaluations on the very real issues that we're currently facing on the world stage."

They didn't break down this episode with detailed show notes, but I remember this conversation with Taran Rosenthal and Lukas Wolf as a candid trialogue about spiritual practice and psychological inquiry. Very broad, friendly banter that ranged far but stayed close to the heart of things...

Upcoming Concert

Lastly! I'm excited to announce that two years to the day after my last pre-pandemic day, and on the same amazing stage, I'll be back at Meow Wolf's House of Eternal Return to open for the awesome electroacoustic harpist Mary Lattimore! If you live nearby (meaning as far as Denver), join me on December 14th and we'll have a grand old time:

“Be messy and complicated and afraid and show up anyways.”

— Glennon Doyle Melton