Arkansas & Iceland • Psychedelic Komodo Dragon • Dippin Dots Singularity • New Instrumental Works for Guitar • Four Awesome Future Fossils Episodes

Greetings, friends!  I hope this update finds you well...

Before we get into it, I just want to let you know this weekend's romp at Cosmic Flux in Arkansas is going to be my last live painting gig for quite some time.  

Live art has been awesomely inspiring, adventurous, and brought me friendships that will last a lifetime...but it's not sustainable.  Time and experience invested do not translate into job security or better pay, and the systems aren't in place to support painters without regular collectors.  Ten years is long enough to know I'm not going to get a raise, and that I could be serving better in some other way.  

Not going to give up art entirely – just going to sink my roots in deeper, travel less, get more done, and align to the most valuable work I can be doing.  

Right now that is Future Fossils Podcast (huge thanks to all 101 of you supporting me on Patreon!); my work as resident philosopher for the Crypto Crew cryptocurrency web learning community; writing How To Live in the Future; and finally delivering that studio LP of psych-futurist acoustic-electronic love-songs I've been promising for years.

But in the meantime, see you in Arkansas this weekend!

I'm also totally excited to attend this seminar in Iceland with my graduate advisor, integralist Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, where I'll learn how to expand our ideas of "capital" and "impact" to perform magical and meaningful tweaks to organizations and their cultures.  

Tuning companies and governments to the accelerating transformations of our century feels like The Good Work and I'm honored that I have this chance to forge ahead and bring back vital insights to you from this seminar:

The overall mood this spring is "immense transition" – and hopefully I can inspire you by letting go of some of who I used to be to make more room for who I can be.  As always, I'm committed to a constant process of growth, learning, and discovery so I can bring it back to you...

I'm selling a handful of paintings at unprecedented discounts to afford this trip.  If you've wanted a piece from me but didn't think you had the funds, let's pleasantly surprise each other!  Drop me a line and I'll send you a list of what I still have.

That's all for now.  I love you.  Thank you and may all your work this week go smoothly...

Michael

"Living Fossil"

2018 • acrylic/canvas • 40"x30"

Obtain Prints

(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)

Around this time last year I painted a giant rooster in the southern hemisphere to commemorate the "year of the fire rooster". I feel like I don't really control what comes through when - because I had it in my mind that I was going to paint a monitor lizard when I got to Australia and that so did not happen. So last summer, visiting my painter friends in Colorado, I thought I would double back and catch up with that lizard...and then I hated the painting I'd started and left it in the garage for 6 months.

Never one to simply walk away from something, though, I figured I might shine some love on this one at the Llano Earth Art Festival, an awesome little yearly gathering in Central Texas. It's gone on for the last 4 years but this year I got to invite four other painter friends to join the team. Live art is a team sport. Their warmth and friendship made it easier for me to love this piece again.

Shortly after I had the thought that a Komodo dragon, while not technically an Australian animal, is sort of like "the dog of lizards' and therefore may be appropriate as a "year of the earth dog" painting, someone came up to me and said it looked like a dog. So: vindicated.

Thanks to every one of my artist friends whose friendship made it into this lizard: Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Andrew Thompson, Martin Cash, Will Ross, Chance Roberts, Elliot Rogers, Dixon Stovall, y'all alright. :)

"Crystalline Rows (aka Dippin Dot Singularity)"

2018 • acrylic/canvas • 18"x24"

Obtain Prints

(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)

Fact: In the future, ice cream will be revolutionized by the handicraft of mad inventor Charles Dippin, whose nanotechnological breakthrough will enable us to miniaturize ice cream scoops to the size of tiny "dots." These "Dippin Dots" then self organize into a quasicrystalline fluid lattice that adapts and learns by shifting frozen nodule matrices. This painting is a photorealistic depiction of the last image taken by the security camera at the lab desk of Charles Dippin on September 22nd, 2049 - the moment just before the core mass of streaming, undulating, flowing-but-faceted "Dots" all disappeared in a white flash, presumably into the past and who knows what fate...

The dots were organizing along invisible manifolds of influence, gathering at nodes and junctures of a gauzy floral sculpture that sang as it flowed together and apart, harmonics of the network chatter and evolving anatomy of a billion streaming balls of cream-based computronium. Dippin knew his work was then complete, and he surrendered his flesh into the vanilla-and-chocolate goo to be reborn as a submodule of the new metamorphic god-mind as it grew - so long as the time travel didn't damage its internal architecture somehow, so long as its impulses wouldn't be scrambled in the risky transit, rendering the baby god just senseless, mindless ice cream on the other side of time...

Garden Underground: Live at SquareRüt Kava Bar, 13 Jan 2018

Stream/Download Here

My friend and frequent collaborator Will Ross called this the best set he's ever heard me play.  It's definitely chill and spacious, atmospheric and emotional, just how I like them.

I've been exploring the acoustic guitar as an electronic instrument for ten years...this is some of what's grown out of that.  (Some other fan favorite releases are here, here, here, and here.)

Patreon and Bandcamp subscribers get it free.  Everyone else can have it for the price of a latte.

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Downloads & Show Notes Here

Preview My New Solo Album | My Biggest Painting Yet | Grateful Dead Envelope Art | Novelty Generators Podcast | New Writing For Globalish

"If I had to bet my life on what's more real, I bet on the thing that inspires me."
– Annie Lalla, MDMA therapist

The thing about a planetary culture is that as the Earth gets smaller, all the consequences of our actions happen faster. Cause-effect relationships are more immediate and tangible. The feedback loops draw tighter. We can see the patterns in how everything we do affects the whole.

Re-associate yourself and let the moral evolution happen. Power lies in understanding. No, it isn't comfortable. Yes, it's an improvement.  And now, our regularly scheduled programming...

My Final Solo Cyberguitar Album's Almost Here...

Download Three Free Tracks  & Preorder the Entire Album Here

My new album drops this Tuesday, January 27th.  If, as Hakim Bey says, "Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance,” then I believe this is the greatest tombstone I have ever made. 

Most of y'all probably don't know that I make music...or that I was pouring my soul into my music career long before I became a professional artist. But songcraft and mapping new terrain between acoustic and electronic music on guitar is my great adventure, and this album is the product of techniques refined across 100,000 miles of touring.

If you enjoy my art, or my ideas, I hope you'll take some time (with headphones, or a hula hoop) to listen to this music - and the many other albums I have on that site and offer you for free. I've channeled some amazing places into sound and let some awesome inspirations through that I can't claim, but wonder at when I go back and listen.

This is music for a journey, flow arts, making love - it's rich with atmosphere and feeling, and I'm honored that I get to share it with you.  Thanks for your support!

Cleopatra

32"x48" – oil & acrylic paint pens on masonite

Buy 11"x17" prints | Like/Comment/Share On FB

Painted (so far) at:
• 15.10.2014 & 19.01.2015 – Studio
• 25-26.10.2014 – Art Outside (WELDER, DJ Vadim, Fort Knox Five, Phutureprimitive,The Widdler, BoomBaptist, Thriftworks, Kaminanda, D.V.S*, Blue Sky Black Death, Emancipator, Papadosio)
• 12.12.2014 – $3 Shows at Swan Dive (Amy Arani, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, Carry Illinois, Trouble in The Streets, Groovement, The Holy Child)

A tongue-in-cheek homage to some of my favorite artists (points if you can guess). I always thought that nudes were cheating: easy sales, and all too often they objectify the feminine. But that became my challenge: can I make a piece that's both ridiculous and reverent, that satirizes "festy art" yet still evokes the ancient-future sacred visionary landscape earnestly?

I don't know if I succeeded, but I really liked the process. Still deciding whether I will leave this how it is or finish it with (tasteful) iridescent highlights in two weeks at Gem and Jam Festival. Regardless, I'll post detail photos soon. This is my largest piece to date and has a lot of tiny touches in it...

Or, for those of you that need more color...

Like/Comment/Share On FB

Somehow doubt I'll win given the amazing competition...but regardless, this was super fun.  I rarely have a reason to exhume my Prismacolor pens and doodle major iconography like this...

My Guest Appearance on Novelty Generators Podcast

 Stream & Subscribe on Youtube

If you're short on big ideas and visionary vistas, here's something that should jumpstart your imagination: I recently enjoyed a wonderful discussion with filmmaker Niles Heckman on his Novelty Generators podcast. We talked about everything from how the human brain is co-evolving with machines, to the future role of myth, to some of my favorite graphic novels, to how a global culture challenges idea of wilderness...

More Writing for Globalish: Read. Watch. Awaken.

My main gig nowadays is as a writer for this fabulous new website, Globalish – where we explore the intersection between ageless spiritual teachings and contemporary culture.  Here are the articles I've written for them since my last newsletter posted:

Channel 1: Revolution

True Liberation vs. Miley Cyrus' "Tongue Tied": Free Speech by Imprisoned Minds

Yasiin Bey's Eric Garner/Ferguson Statement Set to Fallou Diop's Jazz

Channel 2: Travel

Mear One: Hip Hop Science Fiction Proletariat with Spray Cans

Neuroscientist Michele Ross Describes Her First Experience with DMT

South African Street Artist Faith47 Captures the Soul of City Living

On How to See with Loving Eyes: Sri Lanka Through a Smartphone

Channel 3: Art

Pixel-Extraits: Thought Becomes Environment in Computer-Dance Collaboration

Viktoria Modesta: The World's First Amputee Pop Star

Channel 4: Life

The Patterns of Gentrification: Who's Aware of the Story?

Honesty: Nothing Real Can Be Threatened, Nothing Unreal Exists

Pearl of Africa: The Debut of Uganda's First Transgender Web Series

Beautiful Chemical Reactions: Who's Aware of the Story?

Next Month: See you in Arizona!

"I followed weirdness and wrote about it. The exploration of the unusual became a way of being. Most of the interesting people I've met did the same thing."

– Erik Davis

The Very Best I Have To Offer: Painting Sale, Live Music 2011-2014, New Art, Discussing Ayahuasca, More Art & Future Coverage for Globalish

“One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we’ll need a new definition.”

– Alvin Toffler

Many thanks to all of you for your attention, for reading and listening to my work, for sharing my posts – every once in a while money gets tight but it makes me happy to know it's in service of large audience who are are (even silently) benefiting from what I share and create.

This edition's big news are my cyberguitar retrospective, a sale on my original art, a new painting, and some of the finest writing I've produced to date.  Enjoy!

25% Off All Original Paintings

Browse Available Pieces Here

I think it's actually been over a year since I last offered discounts on my paintings...at any rate, I'm back to wanting them to find good homes more than wanting to ask what people tell me they're really worth. If you connect with a piece but can't afford 25% off the marked asking price, let me know – I'm happy to split the cost up into payments, budge a little more, possibly even make partial trades.

Any money I make on this is going to help me make it through the festival off-season and to continue volunteering my time as a writer and musician. Most of what I do is unpaid labor and I am deeply, deeply grateful to all of you for your support in helping me dedicate my life to my creative work. If you want to show some love but original art is still out of your spending range, I have plenty of poster prints and pins for sale.

My Epic New Name-Your-Price Retrospective

Click Here & It's Yours

"Michael has mastered a method of looping and playing that is on a pedestal all on its own. Ultimately [this album] is an exploration into what you perceive music, the guitar, and technology can do…completely altering it. If you want to go someplace else, someplace new, get this album." 

– Mixolydian Blog

These twenty-seven tracks are fossils of my favorite moments in four years of fully improvised performances. They chronicle the maturation of my voice and sketch the outlines of an epic tour and self-discovery...

I never thought this music would be soundtrack to the art, lovemaking, yoga, writing, childbirth, and magic that it has. I'm honored that it resonates with anyone at all. But then, we live in times when cyborg folk makes sense.

For now, this is what I consider the definitive collection of my work – THE place to start, for people new to what I'm doing, and rich terrain for introspection as I prepare for my next phase in life and music.

New Painting

"Freshwater Kraken"

Studio – 2014 – Paint pens on masonite – 16"x24"

11"x17" Poster Prints

Fourth in a series of chromatic explorations into the basic visual language emerging between microscopic life and antique vegetal design. Floral patterns, paisleys, and damasque collide with retroviruses, trichomes, and DNA in a self-organizing burst of juicy color...

More Writing For Globalish

I love to write.  I LOVE it.  And for years I have neglected this because I wasn't getting paid.  Poor form!  I know.  But now my friends at Globalish have me on board as one of their lead authors, and I'm deeply in the game again.  The topics reach from visionary art and futurism to religion, politics, and music.  You will love this website.

Here are links to all my latest – there are too many to read, realistically, so I've starred a few of my favorites:

    • Channel 1: Revolution
    Reza Aslan: There's No Such Thing As "Muslim Countries"
    Prince Ea & Glenn Beck Talk Love and Consciousness *
    The Equivalent of a Lady Pope: India's First All-Female Akhada
    City of Philadelphia Decriminalizes Marijuana

    • Channel 2: Travel
    Google Put Cameras on Camels to Map the Arabian Desert *
    Explore a Miniature Tokyo in this Tilt-Shifted Time-Lapse
    Eye of the Needle: A Psychedelic Journey with Ayahuasca

    • Channel 3: Art
    New Apps Turns Text Messages Into Face-to-Face Meetings With Strangers
    Check Out Mars-1's Freeform Psychedelic Masterworks *
    Journey Through Time and Swim at Midnight with Tokimonsta
    Drone Du Soleil: Quadcopters Join Popular Dance Troupe
    Portrait of a Dancer: José Navas Shows Paradox of Living Today *
    Is the Future of Car Commercials Visionary? *
    Inside Me: 3D Scanner Imagery Digitizes the Human Body *
    That's Not Supposed To Happen: A Film About the Mystery of Life

    • Channel 4: Life
    YourBot App Sold As Way To Preserve Legacy for Hundreds of Years
    Smart Chopsticks: Your Simple Cyborg Health Ally
    Enlightened: Divinity Will Not Beckon On Your Terms
    An Indian Satellite Is Now Circling Mars
    Prophecy: The Future Will Be Absolutely Fantastic
    The Human Heart Is No Longer Necessary To Life
    Cymatics and 3D Language: Who's Aware of the Story? *

Art Outside is in One Week!

My last festival appearance for the time being is going to be a doozy: in addition to performing my fifth annual set and live painting, I'll also be performing alongside cellist Jen Mulhern and vocalist Tina Rodriguez as the musical accompaniment to the ethereal dance & projection work of ARTheism.  Add about a hundred awesome musical acts, a superb and extensive visual art lineup, and some choice workshops, and you get probably the best festival for its price in the United States.  No joke.  Hope to see you there...

Aya Awakenings Panel Discussion Video

Full HD Video | Stream/Download the Audio

The full half-hour video of the panel discussion I had with Mitch Schultz (director of DMT: The Spirit Molecule) and Rak Razam (director of Aya: Awakenings) after Rak's film screening in Austin this February.  Rak and Mitch are amazing guys.  We went DEEP.  It was awesome.

Parting Shot: MG Ravenectar Dress in Cosmic Village's Video

Full HD Video

Uche Sandra Ike wears it proud in this cool shoot for her "Creation Sessions," making music alongside painter Ali Kapper and flow artist Christine Katherine Dice.  It's a cool song and a lovely pastoral clip.  You can buy that dress she's wearing.

Thanks for reading, listening, and sharing.  I hope you have a magnificent week!

My TED Application, Three New Paintings, Debating The Singularity, Collected Musical Works Volume I

"A man is a method, a progressive arrangement, a selecting principle, gathering his like to him, wherever he goes. He takes only his own, out of multiplicity that sweeps and circles round him." 

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Here's to change.  Now that festival culture is getting featured by The New York Times, perhaps it's time for me to move on...or at least grow, to include my last seven years' of work in the body of something greater.  Something that serves you better.

Let's start with my bid for the big time – an amazing opportunity to join a few dozen people selected from a worldwide pool of applicants to attend the TED conference all expenses paid, speak at the conference, and benefit from free professional coaching. Filling out this application was exciting, hopeful, inspiring, and deep.  Having to explain why you're a promising young human to The Wizard of Oz is a ripe moment of reflection...

My 2015 TED Fellows Application

Q: Tell us about your work.

A: The goal of my work is to heal the divide in people's minds between art, science, and spiritual practice – to help others see these three domains as lenses through which anything can be explored, in service of a map that marries disciplines and sees beyond the isolation of modernity into a world whose richness only deepens as we add perspectives.

I am a liminal creature, standing between cultures and traditions to help suture them together – speaking one world in the language of another, juggling metaphors and dancing in the flow of information. My work is an evolving map that links our generation's struggle to a cosmic story, and hopefully empowers people to be true cosmopolitans creatively engaged in our world's future. We need all hands on deck right now. I'm a life-as-art recruiter.

Read my whole application here.

Three New Paintings

A series of chromatic explorations into the basic visual language emerging between microscopic life and antique vegetal design. Floral patterns, paisleys, and damasque collide with retroviruses, trichomes, and DNA in a self-organizing burst of juicy color...

Dragon Tail

11"x17" Prints Here

Dragon Eggs

11"x17" Prints Here

Happy Kraken

11"x17" Prints Here

Global Brains & Singularities: Debating The Technopocalypse with Cadell Last

Cadell Last and I put a ton of time into this thorough exploration of light and dark potentials for our future. If you've ever gazed at the stars wondering what's in store for us, check this out.

It goes without saying, please share this. I think it's an important conversation.

"Humanity” will probably come to mean all kinds of wacky things – I know a bunch of people who are already camping in a proverbial line around the block for their new tentacles, gills, wings, computer backups, etc. But I seem to have a harder time than you do imagining that some watershed moment is ahead of us in time that marks an epochal break point into a radically different state of being than any previous radical shift. As far as I’m concerned, we’re already over the rainbow – it’s just become the new normal to us.

Read the whole thing here.

Collected Works, Volume I

Stream Selected Clips & Download Here

321 TRACKS across THIRTY live releases chronicling my evolution as an avant-garde guitarist and singer-songwriter – including previously unreleased material recorded everywhere from underground caves to mountaintops – now exclusively available in this bundled collection!

FOR SUPER-FANS ONLY – if you're just getting started, turn back now. This collection captures some of my weirdest musical moments to date – tripping in the desert west of Albuquerque, jamming under tarps during a central Texas rainstorm – as well as improvs from the Costa Rican jungle and MAPS Psychedelic Science conference, radio broadcast performances, coffeehouse gigs, festival sets, and records of more wild house parties than you can shake a stick at.

New Art & Future Writing For Globalish

My big thing recently has been writing for the awesome website Globalish.com, covering visionary culture, technology, and perspectives on our ever-faster headlong dive into the future.  Here are my latest pieces on our strange and beautiful age:

Current Future

• The Future of Journalism is Virtual Reality
• Silicon Valley Children Interviewed About Earth’s Future
• Interspecies Internet: Apps for Ape & Dolphin Computers
• New “Electree” Solar Chargers Mimic Potted Plants
• Meet Pepper, the “Love Powered” Robot that Knows How You’re Feeling
• Humans are Next: Reprogramming Mice’s Brains with Light
• New Website Promises Social Media Fame to Subscriber Who Dies First

• Air Purifying Billboard Cleans Construction Site in Peru

• Love Project: See Human Emotions Transformed into 3D Printed Objects

Visionary Culture

• Discover Liquid Stranger’s “Underwater Extraterrestrial Bass Music”
• Quixotic: Barnum and Bailey’s Circus for the 21st Century
• Desert Dwellers: Celebrating Tribal Culture with the Temple Step Project
• Eskmo’s New Track & Video Addresses California Drought
• Dance & Animation Merge in ARTheism’s Colorful Light Shows

And Now A Message From Our Sponsor

I couldn't do it without you...seriously.  If you have any suggestions for how my art could go on clothes, or gear, or anything – please let me know!  I am so dedicated to producing what you want.

That includes original art.  I've got a long season at home ahead of me and would love to make you something at a price you can afford.  Meanwhile:

My Next Big Gig

One of my favorite festivals all year, now even more amazing than before.  The lineup this year is incredible.  I'm putting a lot of love (and guests) into this very special set...and have some tickets at a discount if you'd like one.

Videos: Cyberguitar at BRC | Talk: Entertainment As Social Action | Consciousness App | New Merch Galore | Upcoming Shows

"A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, 

the separation between himself and the artist."

- Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art?

New Cyberguitar Videos From Burning Man 2013

Watch the whole set in my Burning Man 2013 playlist.

Live at Center Camp Café, 27-8-2013.  I had just unpacked my camp and rolled my sixty pounds of gear a quarter mile across the desert to play this gig after four straight days of driving across country from Austin to Boulder to Black Rock City – two days of which I spent crumpled in a feverish heap in my friend's passenger seat, praying I would be able to play this show.  The fates were smiling on me this night!  As soon as I got in the gate, a wave of YES broke over me and I ended up jamming one of my most inspired improvisational sets to date.  At the end they told me the next act never showed up, so the last video in this series (right before the camera battery died) is of me inviting my many excellent musician friends in the audience to come jam with me on stage.  

These videos feature a whole bouquet of techniques – Ebow, nylon brush percussion, LFOs, multichannel looping, pitch shifting, delay tweaks, and more – as I transform the initial space-radio 6/8 groove into glacial psy-ambient acoustic metal, then a slow-burning instrumental pop anthem.  Just another day at the wheel...  :)

The best parts of this set, and the one I played at Fractal Planet, are available on Bandcamp as a Free/Pay-What-You-Like Download...along with about 30 more hours of lovely acoustic cyberdelia.  Please, go help yourself if you haven't already.  My cup runneth over, and people tell me it's good music for flow arts, making babies, and stuff.

Here are the rest of my way-hella-tons of audio recordings from Burning Man 2013:

Talks: View From The Horizon | Taking A Cosmic Perspective | Life in the Glass Age 

Music: Earth Song For Sky Dance | Looper's Night at Center Camp

Wow!  It's all published.  Sweet Mercy, that took forever.  Enjoy...

Entertainment As Social Action @ Art Outside 2013

Free / Pay-What-You-Like Download

How do narrative and metaphor construct our social reality...and how can we use entertainment media to challenge our limitations, reprogram our minds, and make the world a better place?

On the use of poetry and cinema to shape perception, how we are bound together by our entertainment in the body of something greater, and how the internet's unique topography offers us a profound opportunity to redefine what it means to be human...my latest presentation explores the liberating potential of art and the importance of the artist in each of us.

"Could A 'Consciousness App' Change The World?"

New Article & Live Webcast for Reality Sandwich

Well, it's finally happening:  The work of a crack team of advisors – including prominent members of The Institute of Noetic Sciences & Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab – the app turns your smartphone into a Random Number Generator (RNG), calculates the non-randomness of your bitstream as a measure of your mind's potential influence on matter, and generates real-time maps of coherent psychic phenomena – launching a new crowdsourced psychic meteorology we could use to predict significant cultural events and other "disturbances in the Force."

Read more at Reality Sandwich

Live webcast interview with project director Adam Curry
This Thursday – 23 January, at 6 pm PST / 9 pm EST!

New Mind Folds

I'm back in the game.  I love doing these!  Email me if you'd like one – prices range between $50 – 100, so they're a bit more affordable than the flatbills & fedoras (for which I'm also currently taking orders).

View / Share on FB

View / Share on FB

Upcoming Events

I am mixed up in some AMAZING stuff over the next few weeks – live webcast panel discussions; musical performances with intense live digital animation by Topher Sipes; the first gallery show for Third Coast Visions (our live art collective here in TX); and the return of the wonderful Head For The Hills Festival.  My full calendar is on my website.  

Here are some highlights with links to the event pages:

And in case you missed them...

Thanks to very helpful collaborators and recent good turns in fortune, my slickest merch ever is here.  Follow the links below to adorn yourself with wearable art I'm truly proud of, and help me make up for the other 90% of my time I spend on work that doesn't pay – like my technology, art, and consciousness discussion group, uploading all those videos, and writing poetry about the Moon...

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

Buy Link on FB

That's all, folks!  Thanks for reading and stay in touch...