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!:

Quick Science Rant // New Live Painting // Hummingbird Stickers! // Art Outside Announcement

But First, A Riff on Science & Wonder

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop."

– Carl Sagan

We have personal stories and collective stories.  I think it will probably help to see the work I do as a writer and speaker as addressing and investigating the collective dimension of our stories.  William Irwin Thompson wrote that history is the ego of society and myth is its soul.  So learning our evolutionary history is to establish a much deeper grounding for our collective ego…and then to recognize it as a provisional and ultimately groundless scientific fairytale (even as the best we have) is akin to seeing past our ego story into our essential Mystery.  

One of my main theses over the last few years has been that science in its finest form as endlessly unfolding inquiry is basically a spiritual practice – the humility of wonder in pure curiosity, beginner’s mind as a prerequisite to any good experiment.  Of course, the process always ends by disconfirming or confirming a hypothesis, and then we start again with some assumptions – how we choose to ask a question’s all about the paradigm from which we’re asking – so there’s always going to be a point of ingress for the myth, the story by which observations are explained.  Laboratory breakthroughs are the moment of divine invasion; scientific journals are the holy texts.  Each has its visionary fringe more sensitive to the anomalies, the saints in wilderness encountering uncanny revelations, and orthodoxy that rejects new revolutionary insights as if they are immune cells.  The only difference between the institutions we call science and religion are the speeds at which each culture is reformed; the process is identical.  Organized religion’s like a solid; science is a liquid.

And I think we’re on the cusp of something even quicker – the networks that we’re growing are accelerating our adventures in discovery and peer review – and we are possibly approaching our real biological constraints of how fast we can mentally adapt to seeing things in totally new ways.  (Of course, we’re also learning how to be more flexible.  In my finest moments I can let new worldviews flow through me…though I always settle back into a lower state of order.)

Do any of you think about this stuff?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Endothelial Goo Conveyor

Poster Prints & Giclées Here

The first piece that I ever got so fed up with halfway through that I actually tried to destroy it, but the spray paint ran out and it ended up looking so cool, I decided to roll with it and finish what I'd started.  Another step closer to the "H.R. Giger takes 2-CB and gets over his natal trauma" aesthetic I started carving out with this year's painting, "New Age Cleopatra Basks Apocalyptically..."

Painted live with oil & acrylic markers and aerosol paint on canvas (36" x 24") at the following events in 2015:

07-25 Quixotes (Cream Cheese Accident), Denver, CO
07-28 Boulder City Park ("painting in the park" with Randal Roberts, Morgan Mandala, Chelsey Crandell, Joshua Wine Morriston, and many others), Boulder, CO
08-01 Taos Mesa Brewing (Treavor Moontribe, Planewalker, Desert Dwellers, Kaminanda, Kannizle, Buno), Taos, NM
09-02 Empire Patio, Create Culture (Zonra, Soundshaman, Sanjiwan, Fractala), Austin, TX
09-23 The Other Side (Spiritual Rez, Red Sage), Denver, CO
10-02 Westbank String Shop, Austin, TX

Original piece still available – email me with inquiries.

New Hummingbird Stickers!

Get Some Stickers

A few years ago, in preparation for Burning Man, I marked up a plain white tee-shirt with the slogan, "Imagination Is Our Greatest Natural Resource."  This motto grew some wings and flew away, just possibly inspiring this book by futurist Ramez Naam.  It's been a while since I had any stickers, and the time felt ripe to resurrect the motto with a kiss from Beija Flor.

If I see you in person, ask me for one – or you can buy them in quantities both small and large at michaelgarfieldart.com.  Help me spread inspiration and encouragement in your town!

A Roadrunner in Progress

One of the reasons I love live painting is to share the entire process with people. To demystify the creative work and invite other people to imagine themselves as empowered creatives (who much have to spend a few years sleeping in their cars, and postpone having kids for a decade, in order to cultivate their dreams into their waking lives). 

This roadrunner kept showing up on my journey through the enchanted American Southwest and, like so many of my other paintings, just asserted itself as the subject of my next piece. Little did I know that I would have to paint through a vicious windstorm, the easel gorilla taped down and still bucking I'm the gusts, to finish this the night it needed to be finished...

You can read more about this piece, and pick up a print, on my art site.

Playing + Painting + Speaking at Art Outside

I'm honored and delighted to share my first singer-songwriter set in years (here and here are some older recordings) with this year's Art Outside family! We've all got to live our passion, and mine is writing songs about psychedelics, making love in zero gravity, the landscape of eternity, and running from the terrifying beauty of our higher selves.

Years of experimental guitar practice will definitely enrich the atmosphere we'll feed and share together in the pecan grove at the Folk It Up Stage on Saturday at 12:30 pm – but this will be a set of finely crafted ballads, odes, and anthems for the dreamers and lovers. I've played this festival each year since 2010 and feel like I'll be coming home – I cannot wait to share an album's worth of new material with you!  (If you're not going, it will be recorded.)

Love and thanks for all of your support!

Constant Unfolding Creativity – New Painting, Articles, Apparel, & Fall Art Sale

"Great art, music, and literature forces us to reassess our place in the cosmos. That’s what science does.”
– Lawrence Krauss

If we are to judge by petroglyphs and monuments left strewn across five continents and several thousand years, astronomy might be the oldest human discipline. The great cultures of human history saw and emphasized their relationship to the cosmos, through ritual, celebration, inquiry, and architecture. They re-enacted their creation myths in how they built their cities and their homes; they taught their children how to see the world as one coherent pattern, in which each life has meaning as a fractal microcosm of the whole.

Today our story is of randomness, our lives divorced from deeper purpose, and we see the fruit of this in burning forests, broken homes, and epidemic existential grief that manifests as cynical constriction to a smash-and-grab mentality, or worse, apocalyptic dread that seeks release in suicidal wars. We need a better story, one that honors our humility as infinitely modest members of a giant universe but also emphasizes our importance as the stewards of our planet and an adolescent race about to take its maiden voyage out into the stars.

It isn’t either/or. We are both infinitely insignificant and infinitely great, our vast potential matched by how profoundly tiny we must really understand ourselves to be if we’re to act with humor, grace, and decency as we develop godlike technological abilities. And for this reason, science justifies itself – not as the means to greater ends, but as the process by which we discover both the deeper meaning and the silliness of life, a post-religious holiness and future arts beyond today’s imagination. There isn’t any end to this at all. The end is in the constantly unfolding curiosity.

[...from my new writing gig at Globalish.]

Find me on Tsu

Right now I'm excited about a new social network that pays its users 90% of the ad revenue we generate – if you've ever felt like Facebook and others are this century's version of slave labor, join me over at tsu.  It's badass.  I'll still frequent those other sites but I'm eager to participate in what I see as an evolution in how we organize ourselves online.

(It isn't as progressive as minds.com – it's still proprietary, not open source.  But it's a step in the right direction.)

New Painting: "Fire Flower"

Buy Prints | Like/Share on FB

Oil and acrylic paint markers on 24"x36" masonite panel

Check out the process on Instagram here, here, and here.

Painted in studio 09 02 – 10 21 2014 and live at:

• 01 October – Austin, TX – Lanai Rooftop Lounge for Bumble, Funky Jesus, Luxor, Twips, Fractala

• 10 October – Austin, TX – Swan Dive for Jabu Mbara, Meganoke, Satalights, Myth Magic, Matthew Squires & The Learning Disorders, Deadbeat Poetry

Original painting available and currently on discount (see below).

New Articles For Globalish

Anyone who knows me knows how passionate I am about the big perspective – the importance of placing our quickly shifting age in context as a moment in the evolutionary story, to connect our generation's challenges with a greater understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Globalish is all about that, and I'm so grateful to have a regular gig writing for them.  If you consider yourself in the growing global movement of creative urban seekers, you'll be just as glad as I am to have found this site.

Here are some of my most recent articles for Globalish:

Revolution:

Ai WeiWei Takes Over Alcatraz For New Exhibition

Harvard Students Answer: Who's A Bigger Threat, America or Isis?

Travel:

A Bouquet of Moments: Discover the People and Places of Turkey

Take a Virtual Stroll Through Kitengela Road in Nairobi, Kenya

Wear This Technology to Experience Psychosis with Digital LSD

Art:

DJ Ta2Mi: Buddhist Priest Doubles As Electric Music Producer

Relativity of Scale: Your Body is a Wonderland

Visionary Artist Android Jones with Burning Embrace

Birds on Power Lines Equal Symphonies of Sound

Experience a 36-Hour Art Vigil with Visionary Painter Eric Nez

Israeli Grad Student Creates Jewelry That Harvests Energy From Your Veins

Life:

Creeping Garden: The Quest to Create a Human Slime Mold

Ice Cream Is A Feeling...But Who's Aware of the Story?

Can Brain Scans Reveal Your Ideal Self-Image?

Nature's Imagination: The Importance of Our Constantly Unfolding Curiosity

New Tanks, Tees, & Sweaters @ ArtistThreads

I'm excited to release a whole suite of new apparel through this California-based company, whose contracts are respectful of participating artists and whose prices are super reasonable considering the expensive dye-sublimation process that gives these awesomely bold, never-going-to-fade colors!  Check out their site – I'm on there alongside several other fantastic artists.  

Original Paintings Negotiably Cheap Until December 1st

If you're looking to gift someone some totally rad original art – lovingly-produced, hypnotically vivid eye candy created in high-energy environments and inspired by our world's deepest mysteries – I've discounted all of my live paintings to a pretty ludicrous degree for the next month or so.  Have a look. – the absolute worst thing that could happen is I distract you for the next five minutes.  Best case scenario, you take advantage of an awesome opportunity and we all go home happy...

Thanks for reading and have an awesome weekend!

What We Can Learn From Mass Extinctions | Metaphors & Meta-organisms | The Science of Transformation | Back in the Hat Game

"You don't own your reputation. Most people think they do, but the reality is different. Your reputation is the accumulation of what other people think about what they think you have done or said. In other words, your reputation consists of other people's projections. You don't own that and you don't control it. You can influence it, but only up to a point."

– Ken McLeod

“If you don't have enemies, you don't have character.”

– Paul Newman

Life in the Glass Age: Technology, Art, & Consciousness

Thank you to everyone who supported my recent crowdfunding campaign!  We managed to raise enough to keep me warm and fed this winter as I get cracking on the backbone of my new book and continue to freely share more videos and writing through and about Google Glass (and living through intense technological change in general).

I've started a new FB group – "Life in the Glass Age: Technology, Art, & Consciousness" – to keep the conversation going.  Please join us there with your questions, comments, and news items.

If you'd still like to donate but missed the window for contributing to my Indiegogo campaign, don't sweat it - you can make a paypal donation, and just let me know in the "note" section which of the perks from my campaign you'd like as a gesture of my appreciation for your support.

And now for some big new stuff:

Organizing my thoughts for The Long-Delayed Book!

From catastrophe, new life.  Luckily I've been a compulsive note-taker for the last eight years...

Back in the Hat Game

Like/Comment/Share on FB

My summer tour is over and I'm ready again for cozy months of painting while I listen to inspiring podcasts.  If you'd like a custom hat, feel free to drop me a line.  Orders start at $150 (including the hat) and I am not doing any more Bassnectar or Pretty Lights designs.  (Sorry, kids, but I'd rather not capitalize on someone else's stardom – and you'll thank me when you can still wear the hat in ten years.)

What We Can Learn From Mass Extinctions

Read at BigThink.com

Since “no problem can be solved from the level of thinking that created it,” let’s look at our ecological crisis from the only angle that will help us solve it: not as an invasive species separate from the rest of the biosphere and “killing the planet,” but as something the Earth is doing, part of the story of life, participants in the distributed intelligence of the evolutionary process and thus performing a valuable function we cannot fully understand. This is the sixth mass extinction, so let’s look at how we (identifying with life as a whole, since we have never been completely removed from the layer of life that covers this planet) made it through a comparable crisis before.  (Read more...)

Find hope for the future by studying the past.

Or if you're more of a video person, here is the article above in improvised rant form.  Not as articulate, perhaps, but you can read along to the transcript and listen to the stirring musical accompaniment!

Meta-phors & -organisms, my talk from Rootwire 2013

Download Here

"Metaphorical thinking — our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another, for equating I with an other — shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover, and invent. Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words."

– James Geary

My talk from Rootwire Music and Arts Festival 2013 on how to use a suite of new metaphors to navigate the shifting landscape of 21st Century self and society. Topics include:

• What "The Great Oxygenation Event" of 2.5 billion years ago has in common with our current industrial eco-catastrophe, and how it might inform a solution;
• Why the universe is equally well-described as ramping "up" and "down" – and how these forces merge in the ever-morphing now;
• How every act of communication is both a manifestation of mind and an attempt to promote a specific perspective;
• How experiencing the Earth as a superorganism informs a more responsible theory of economics;
• And more ideas from the fractal horizons of human experience...

Mark Heley at Fractal Planet: The Science of Transformation

Download Here

Mark Heley, author of The Everything Guide to 2012, speaks on taking a galactic perspective at Fractal Planet, Burning Man, 29 August 2013.  I sit in, along with my friends Mitch Mignano and Jonathan Zap, on the conversation.  We discuss the cosmic timing of mass extinctions, our need to understand the dynamic environment of interstellar space, and how we are learning to pilot "Spaceship Earth" into a new and stranger century...

Taking A Cosmic Perspective + My Latest Cyberacoustic Guitar EP

"Death is a stripping away of all that is not you. The secret of life is to 'die before you die' – and find that there is no death."
– Eckhart Tolle

"What man can stand with autumn on a hilltop and fail to see the span of his world and the meaning of the rolling hills that reach to the far horizon?"
– Hal Borland

It isn't autumn – at least here in Austin.  But everyone I know is going through so much change – so much letting go, so much making room for new things – that the theme of autumn is timely nonetheless.

I'm proud to share with you my latest record, as well as the talk I gave at AURA Music Festival back in February – both of which center on facing the transcendental unknown with our heads up and our hearts open.  They're both free downloads.  Enjoy!

And stay in touch – I'm putting together a tour of the Southeast United States in early August and if you live nearby it would be great to connect.  Friends near Austin, Dallas, Denver, Boulder, and Kansas City, check out my concert calendar to check out the wonderful dates I already have planned to spend with you.  Love and blessings!

Yellow Leaves

Stream/Download for Free
Join the conversation on FB

Recorded in a single take at a private backyard concert on Thanksgiving 2012, this 33:33 of improvised "cyberacoustic" instrumentals is my most spacious and poignant yet – evoking big autumn skies, far horizons, and the crunch of fallen leaves by bonfire light – but it defies expectations, remixing the familiar conventions of acoustic music with a fifty-pound pedalboard of beat slicers, filters, delays, and multi-channel loopers, welding fingerstyle technique into a cybernetic bed of live hardware production.

Picking (or often bowing, with an electromagnet) while twisting knobs and DJ'ing live samples with my toes, I perform as an embodiment of my training as an evolutionary biologist and futurist – liberating the organic into the digital, and the idioms of Americana into a new species of transcendental trance. 

Yellow Leaves is a definitive take on the adventurous and visionary musical attitude that earned my tenure as ReverbNation's #1 Experimental Musician in the world.

This performance was recorded on Thanksgiving 2012 and is a kind of musical fossil of that atmosphere of abundance and gratefulness. I hope that it serves you in your self-discovery. That its folksy-yet-futuristic vibe lends itself to your integration of past and future into the ever-blooming now. That it gets you laid by faeries.  (Based on the feedback so far, it may also be good for driving, painting, doing yoga, etc. I encourage you to experiment with set and setting.)

Pay whatever you like if the music works for you. I've had people reporting kundalini experiences, mad love sessions, and other wild shit going on with what I consider to be a pretty tame, if pretty, release.

Regardless, I would deeply appreciate it if you would share it with your people, and tag my music page.

Have a beautiful time with it, and thank you for receiving what I have to give!  Feedback welcome.

My talk from AURA Festival 2013

Stream/Download for Free
Join the conversation on FB

My latest fleet jaunt through the wooded trails of the human imagination.  A philosophical performance examining our relationship to the transcendent – whether through awe and wonder or good old Fear of God, we all have an intense relationship with the Mystery – and how that relationship is due to change.

This time I took on the illusion of the individual, the evolution of technology, and the strangely familiar ancient future – weaving them all into a ripping speculative yarn on worlds beyond our imagination. I discuss right and wrong motivations for transhumanism, the prehistoric origins of the internet, and how the next industrial revolution might bring about a #festivalearth...

Here's the track list, to pique your interest.

1. My lifelong love affair with the Big-Loud-And-Scary

2. The universal desire for novelty

3. The kundalini yoga of techno-evolution

4. The paradoxically tribal, animistic future

5. Cybernetics, materiality, and the extended mind

6. Transcendent worlds in a fractal cosmos

7. Accelerating evolution vs. the ego and Olaf Stapledon's Last Men

8. 3D printing, living buildings, and the civil design revolution

9. Why don't I have a flying saucer?

10. Balancing the inner and outer worlds

11. Beginner's mind and the social incentive for playful brains

12. Living in the belly of the beast

13. LUCA and the illusion of the individual

14. The sacred geometry of convergent cultural evolution

15. What do I think about time warps?

16. Engineering consciousness & Phil Dick's Mood Organ

17. Wild-type transhumans

Download it here.  Talk about it here.  Feel free to tag or email me with questions!

Customized MGxGRC Signature Flatbills

I still have a few hats in every size except 7 3/4 and 8.  If you'd like to order one of these with or without custom paint, email me and I'm happy to give you the details.

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Custom Painted Hats

I don't have a lot of time to do hats before debarking for summer tour; but if you'd like one, hit me up!

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

Like/Comment/Share on FB

What do acoustic guitar, hand-painted hats, and the science of fractals have in common?

"There will come a day when music and its philosophy will become the religion of humanity."
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

“Music is everybody's possession; it's only the publishers who think that people own it.”
– John Lennon

After three years of talking about it, I'm taking a leap of faith to more completely dedicate myself to a life of art, music, and performance philosophy...and finally moving from Boulder to Austin at the end of October.  If music is my religion, then Austin is Mecca, and this pilgrimage is the natural fulfillment of my faith.  Just maybe, it'll also be the next stage of my development as an artist in service to the planetization of human culture.

Between now and my official first gig there on 11/11/11, I'll be down in Austin for Art Outside Festival, and playing a few going-away shows in Denver on the 14th and 25th.  I've met a lot of wonderful people over my four years in Colorado.  Hope I'll see some of you out there!

~ Moving Sale ~

While I'm getting ready to make the move, it's a good time pick up some of my original artwork at cut rates we can decide together.  I'm holding another art sale to help me fund this transition, and you can read all about it and browse the available paintings on my facebook art page.  Please share with anyone you know who's looking for some art to tie the room together...

In other, more gift-related news, editing the talk and concerts I gave at Burning Man is taking longer than I expected.  But while all of that slow-cooks to tender, delicious completion, I'm excited to share my latest live recordings, digital artwork, philosophy talk, live art video, and custom-painted hat.  Enjoy!

Alive in the Zone of the Rose

These latest live recordings strike a new balance between my jazz-inflected folk roots and more recent forays into improvised cyber-acoustic psychedelia...alternately tender and apocalyptic, it's a showcase for both sides of me: the performing songwriter and the hyperspace engineer.

Performed live at the extremely ironic Buddha Asian Bistro in Kansas City, Alive in the Zone of the Rose is a record of my attempt to transform the restaurant's hipster-chic spirituality into a genuine experience of the transcendent for a roomful of distracted weekend diners.  Did it work?  I don't know...but I got some good tracks out of it.  And an excuse to conjure up some intense new digital artwork for the album cover!

In the spirit of the gift economy, I make all of my music available for free.  Anything you can offer to support my work is greatly appreciated – even if that means simply sharing it with your friends.  Thanks for listening!

The Science of Shifting Ages

"If you ask three questions – 'Who are we?' 'Where do we come from?' 'Where are we going?' – any answer to those will give you a myth. You can give a Marxist answer, you can give a sociobiological answer, you can give a Christian fundamentalist or Moslem answer. So myth is basically macro thinking. Technical thinking is micro. It's saying, 'I'm a neuroscientist, I'm a geneticist and I'm not interested in answering the big questions.' If you step back and ask the big questions then you're beginning to think mythopoeically. Science is inherently mythic."

- William Irwin Thompson

In this talk I gave at Tribal Convergence 2011, I examine the changing paradigm in modern science – articulating an emerging worldview that sees a fractal self-similarity between cells, organisms, and planets, and a correlation between the complexity of mind and matter – a worldview that highlights our participation in a cosmic superconsciousness which might eventually become a part of the everyday experience for humankind.

Inspired by poet and cultural historian William Irwin Thompson's "intellectual free jazz," this talk roams through chaos theory, developmental psychology, philosophy of science, and personal narrative to suggest a vaster world than any one domain provides...

"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as to seem not worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

– Bertrand Russell

"As a poet, of course, I have a highly developed imagination, so I ask no one to believe in anything I write here."

– William Irwin Thompson

~ Sonic Bloom Live Art 2011 Video ~

My apologies for taking so freakishly long to publish this in our instantaneous culture, but here it is!  Working as live art director for Sonic Bloom Festival again this summer was so fulfilling – three days, two domes, and over a dozen artists made this one of the real standout live painting events of my summer.  Visit the video page for full information on the artists...

~ New Custom Hat ~

...lastly, here's the latest to show from this enjoyable new pastime.  Click on the picture to take a closer look at the layered design:

for Kyle Dietrich

If you'd like one of these, email me with your budget, hat size, and any stylistic preferences you have.  You can check out my full gallery of custom hats for inspiration...

~ In The Next Newsletter ~

• Full audio from my talk at Burning Man, "Evolutionary Transitions In Individuality;"

• Video from my forthcoming live album of Burning Man musical highlights, Rites of Passage;

• More hand-painted and digital artwork from the highest branches I can reach!

Entirely Too Many Updates!: New Videos, Essays, & Scientific Illustrations

"As the medium through which a galactic order of evolutionary intelligence interacts with and ultimately transforms the material processes and organic expressions of the Earth, the noosphere is not restricted to a limited rationality or a linear either/or meaning. Instead, once we align with the noosphere, we will perceive and know radially. We will experience everything as multiple sets of correspondences that link everything to everything else in a synchronically harmonized multidimensional universe."
- Jose Arguelles

"Too Many Updates." This is the reason attached to about half of the notifications I get when someone unsubscribes from this newsletter...

It all started as an attempt to spread the updates more evenly, to mete them out week by week instead of dumping them all at once on rarer occasion. But some people don't seem to like that. In this age of accelerating future shock, it seems like frequency is more of a problem than depth; after all, it's not about volume or content, but the gross number of unread messages in your inbox.

So now I'm experimenting with a return to form. This monster newsletter is a brushfire clearing the undergrowth for new saplings. It is a binge of expression, months in the making...and in the spirit of our current Retrograde Mercury, it is a blessedly clumsy effort to tie up loose ends, learning from what I have left behind half-cooked and neglected.

It is entirely too much new media to digest in one sitting, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry! But I'm also freaking excited to share all of this with you...blessed to have so much worth sharing.

So enjoy the electronic tome before you...mark as "unread" and return to it later...let your intuition guide you through the overwhelm to those bits that will speak to you most clearly and offer you the most insightful reflections. Consider it a soul bonfire buffet: All You Can Eat, baby. Keep coming back until you've had your fill.

Just don't forget to chew.

..:: Music ::..

I have a special treat for you guys this week. My friend, long-time digital pioneer Ken Scott, just released Harmony – a delicious music visualization program that functions more as active instrument than passive translator.

Ken's goal is to put ridiculous creative control at the fingertips of every person on the planet, effectively toppling the media plutocracy...and as an early demonstration of his potent synaesthetic software, he's rendered the title track from my latest cyber-acoustic guitar album, The Body Electric, in vivid throbbing psychedelic detail:

Watch it in HD on Youtube / Download this track free

Just to be clear, this isn't another iTunes visualizer...every variable can be hand-tweaked to create a living, breathing work of visual art from the music itself as it's happening. You can learn how it works here. It's a perfect creative counterpart to my own boundary-mocking explorations of the acoustic guitar's full cyborg potential (...which are, by the way, still free as a bird at MichaelGarfield.net).

Watch it in HD on Youtube or Vimeo / Download this track free

My fingerstyle anthem "The Sun Setting," leading into improvised acoustic loopscape "Foyer," at Austin's Art Outside Festival (23 October 2010). It's a rebuke to "spiritual bypassing" – the belief that meditation, prayer, or other practices will allow you to escape from your self. On the contrary, they tend only to make a person's issues worse – cloaked under a guise of spiritual purity, where they are invisible and inaccessible to the only one who can do anything about them.

This is how I rock about that.

Watch it in HD on Youtube or Vimeo / Download this track free

My avant-guitar opus "You Don't Have To Move" at 11:11 Wellness in Boulder, Colorado (11 February, 2011). "You Don't Have To Move" is a taoist pop song written on a trampoline at Burning Man 2008 – a pronoiac reminder that when we get out of the way of ourselves, marvelous things occur. "8:33," the half-improvised coda that grew out of "Move" at Rootwire Festival 2010, is a programmatic journey through the apocalypse...and out the other side.

This song is, in eight short minutes, a compendium of every f*cking thing I have learned can be done with a guitar.

..:: Words ::..

"The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals"

In a fit of impassioned manifesto-channeling rapture over St. Patrick's Day weekend, I wrote the most popular essay I've ever published: "The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals." It immediately sprouted over 160 comments on the Facebook note where I let it loose, marshaling both bountiful praise and bilious criticism. Whatever else might be said about it, this essay definitely elicited powerful emotional responses.

It is the crystallization of my deeply held convictions about how exactly I am serving my own soul purpose by working within festival culture – why I don't see what I do as escapist or naïve, but a potent and directed attempt to participate in the co-creation of a saner world by leveraging the unique opportunities of entertainment media to inspire people into conscious engagement as agents of a truly transcendent collaborative evolutionary (ad)venture.

But no picture is complete without its shadows, and I also see the incredible potential of many festivals today squandered by exploitation and ravenous consumer culture...

Here are the opening strains. I highly encourage you to join the conversation and leave your own remarks on Facebook after reading. The best part of this has been the discussion:

Someone I had once called a friend, whose work I consider extremely important but whose attitude I find tiresome and counterproductive, recently wrote to me:

"You live in denial and a false reality, and I don't. I live in the real world and grapple with its problems every day; you spend your life running from reality, hiding inside little bubbles of like-minded escapists in festivals and secluded retreats, where there is 100% confirmation bias amongst the homogenous crowd."

This was my response:

"As for 'hiding in festivals,' I go where I feel like I'm needed. I don't see like minds; I see lost souls, a society with great potential that lacks the grasp of context and sense of purpose necessary to do something constructive with their lives. I am fighting as hard as I can to ensure that my generation isn't wasted on meaningless consumption and hollow drug experiences but is able to recognize and wield the positive and constructive potential of festivals - namely, to create a space where people can network, share worthwhile ideas, and assist one another in their potentiation, instead of just buying sh*t and getting f*cked up."

"In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. That, in essence, is the higher service to which we are all being called."

- Buckminster Fuller

“Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”

- Jean Piaget

Keep reading, and offer your own perspective...

~~~

In other news...I'm obviously a zealot, but sometimes I think I'm also a fool for releasing all of my music, writing, and presentations on a "pay-what-you-can" (aka "sleep-on-your-friend's-couch-cuz-you-can't-afford-your-own-room") model.

Then I remind myself that we don't own ideas; ideas own us. And I get on a rant like this one:

"Intellectual Property Is Bullsh*t"

Don't you agree? Then share away, my friend...

~~~

...And while you're busy sharing, you might take a moment to appreciate how you're helping build the emergent mind of a global superorganism in which each of us are as small and insentient – yet as vital and unified – as blood cells and neurons within a human body. This is one prevailing theme in my new essay series, "Ode To A Paradigm Shift," which launched this week on Ehren Cruz's luminous living library of spiritual resources, SolPurpose.com.

"Ode" is an ongoing immersion course in the kind of synchronistic, holonomic thinking espoused by Jose Arguelles in this newsletter's opening, above. And for that reason it is so timely, so urgent, that I have no choice but to publish it as fast as it streams out of me. This is my finest humble attempt at poeticizing the great shift in which all of us are taking part...

Here's a taste, from the first in a series of weekly installments:

Suddenly the hidden extent of my island reality came up crashing over the waters and showed itself as, actually, a continent, a common idea. The edge of that human superorganism swung like dawn from orbit into view and everywhere I looked people were having the same ideas. I could almost feel – I started to imagine as if – a thin web of us, like a slime mold connected by the sweet ectoplasm of wireless transfers...I saw myself looking from orbit – not from “my own” eyes, but through a gauzy layer of satellite sensors I operate embodiedly – and flipping through the views of every mind possessed of a certain idea: here first is the map of people who are currently thinking about sex/about money/about postmodernism, and here are the people who are having a hunch about something (you can see it in the glow of their threshold-passing enteric nervous activity, revealing some areas of the planet make people more sensitive in different nervous regions)…to view the body of a notion resonating through the Earth body into each of us, to varying degrees…to finally capture gods on camera.

Keep reading...

..:: Visual Art ::..

Oh right! The artwork. I wasn't gonna leave you hanging...

Well, once upon a time – long before I found my calling in the noise and color of festival culture – I worked every day in the quiet offices of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum Department of Herpetology. I took a scientific illustration course my senior year of college and was hired straight out of class to assist the new professor with his field guides and species descriptions of the reptiles and amphibians of the Philippines...and there I stayed for four years, stippling for four hours a day, drawing scale after gorgeous, tedious scale. I got to listen to whatever I wanted on my headphones – which ultimately gave me a second education – and I retrained myself to hunch for inhuman blocks of time over the microscope, tracing every contour of tiny creatures stiff and rank with formalin through the lens of a camera lucida.

It was the single biggest influence on what eventually blossomed into my precise and intricate pen-work as a live painter. It was, for a while, a kind of shelter for my vagabond heart – one of the few constants in my life as I went through the existential crisis that drove me out of academia and into my independent study of fractals, aliens, and the evolution of consciousness. And it gave me the credibility I needed to travel for paleontological illustration assignments in Wyoming and Arizona – some of the most beautiful and fulfilling work I have ever done, to this day.

After years of keeping my scientific illustration portfolio locked up on an auxiliary hard drive, I realized the error of my ways and made it available for everyone, so you can all appreciate a little more deeply both my own prequel-esque backstory and the profound beauty of nature to which I owe my ongoing inspiration:

Scientific Illustration Gallery

~~~

Lastly: Aside from my handful of time-lapse videos, there isn't much footage online of me in action as a live painter. So in order to bring balance to The Force, I just scrounged up this short clip on my Facebook art page – taken by my friend Jessica Perlstein while I'm in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park during last year's 4/20 celebration, trying (and failing) to paint in the rain. It's great in media res footage, if you want a brief dip in the vibrance and silliness of this calling's brighter moments.

~~~

So there you have it. Enjoy the tour... While you're sifting through all of this, I'm already hard at work on part two of this ludicrous pleroma-storm of gifting...a somewhat more manageable update with new lectures, digital artwork, rediscovered guitar loopscapes, and musings on the nature of time and mind.

Thank you, immensely, for staying with me on this journey.