Hey everyone! I'm trying to keep my updates to you shorter lately, and keep pace with the Moore's Law-like miniaturization of attention spans. Here's your most succinct newsletter yet. Enjoy!
• I just uploaded all of my fan-favorite musical releases for your free streaming pleasure at Choon, the new blockchain-powered music service that pays playlist curators in cryptocurrency. Go get yourself signed up and paid for sharing music! Or just enjoy eleven of my albums, no strings attached.
• Third Eye Drops Podcast had me back on recently, along with my friend Andrew O'Keefe, to talk about my super trippy essay, "The Future Is Disgusting" (and about a zillion other tangents). Listen to it here. Always a good time!
• I am still offering up to 50% off the list price for all my paintings – as well as taking payment plans and partial trades. Deep gratitude to everyone who's purchased art from me so far!
This show just keeps on getting better! And now there are more places you can tune in – including YouTube, Steemit, and soon Choon (currently adding the entire archive, five a day). Episode 81 with Arthur Brock resulted in my most-successful tweet of all time. All three of these episodes are great:
Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit
Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit
Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit
“Ultimately, art does have a function: it’s to help us better navigate the infinite chaos that is reality.”
– JF Martel
Yay, it's spring! Time to navigate the chaos of 2017 with grace, open-mindedness, exuberance, and playfulness. Here are some things that, hopefully, will help you with that – starting with a few quick videos and one extremely deep and magical discussion...
New Videos
On my recent tour of Oz, I stopped by Uplift Connect to chat with them about what I've learned from studying the fossil record and what it can teach us about the extraordinary times we're living in.
Here's a quick two-minute takeaway insight I hope serves you as well as it serves me.
I think this is the coolest video I've ever made – in which I lay it plain how sex, art, and consciousness all intersect and led to the creation of the world we know. Bookmark this for when you have seven minutes to appreciate it.
It's a 360º time-lapse live painting video of my first collaboration with my friends Randal Roberts and Morgan Mandala, two of the coolest people I know. But the real magic sauce is in how the music and narration combine with this video to create a synesthetic, synergetic and emergent something-greater-than-its-parts.
I literally spooked myself with the synchronicities of the end result. Enjoy!
New Podcast
My latest inspiring conversation about the cosmos is with JF Martel, film-maker and author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice – as well as the three-part essay "Reality is Analog," about the philosophical themes lurking behind Netflix's series Stranger Things.
Recorded live on 12 November 2016 at COSM, Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, in Wappingers Falls, New York. Performed on acoustic guitar, voice, and hardware effects pedals (no computers, no prerecorded samples, entirely live and improvised).
This music is an invocation of creative spirit for the benefit of all beings. Recommended listening environments: painting parties, cuddle puddles, chillout sessions, game night, long daylight drives, and making love...
33% of sales go to supporting the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors and their project to build Entheon, a museum of visionary art.
Delivered at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors (Wappingers Falls, New York) on 12 November 2016, this talk – my first at COSM – was truly epic (three hours, minus the half-hour of pauses and throat-clearing I edited out for your benefit). Based on the work of Penn State professor Richard Doyle – especially his book, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – this is a talk about art as magic, and awareness as the medium of all creative work.
It's about how we got here and what we're doing and how the cosmic table's tilted in favor of evermore creative and intelligent ideas and organisms. It's about your purpose in the world and where this ride is taking us and how you can embrace the change and chaos for a more creative and rewarding life...
New Merch
I've been slacking on my society6 merchandise shop for a while, so I just fixed that with dozens of new items featuring some of my favorite recent pieces. If you have a new device or space, consider fancying it up with some of these new decals, cases, pillows, notebooks, tapestries, etc. ...
That's all for now. Thank you for reading and have a magnificent week!
"If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
– Gospel of Thomas
I ordinarily try to space these out and keep things focused, but it just happened that I recently completed THREE new paintings I'd been working on for quite a while, PLUS a time-lapse video, PLUS a bunch of writing for the awesome Globalish.com – so this newsletter's kind of overfull.
Suggestion: open in a separate tab and read at leisure. There's a lot to dig, here. Be well and enjoy!
$10 Year-End Print Sale
Every print older than this newsletter is only $10 until 2015 – these above and dozens more, which you can browse on Bandcamp. If you want to do all of your shopping in one place, I'm trying to make it as easy as possible for you. Happy Holidays!
A look into my process and philosophy, inspiration and commitment as an artist. Recorded through Google Glass; soundtrack from my New Year's Day 2014 sunrise cyberacoustic guitar set; narration from my talk at Firefly Gathering 2014. You can get a better look at the final piece below...
Original painting available – email with inquiries
Painted at • 2014.11.15 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX)
for Govinda, Living Light, Cactus Bath
• 2014.11.14 - 18 – Studio (Austin, TX)
H.R. Giger's alien has haunted me since childhood. I swear their hives must occupy the bulk of my imagination's dark side. And now my friends at Synergetic Press have just released a new book, H.R. Giger and the Zeitgeist of the Twentieth Century, by pioneering LSD psychotherapist Stanislav Grof.
It's amazing – both Grof's essay and the Giger art inside, a lot of which I've never seen – and if you would like a copy, enter "Garfield" for $10 off at checkout.
Original painting available – email with inquiries
Painted at
• 2014.09.28 – Zelicks (San Marcos, TX) – Fractālà
• 2014.10.18 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX)
for Pretty Lights Music Showcase: Paul Basic, SuperVision, Michal Menert, Eliot Lipp
• 2014.11.18 – Holy Mountain (Austin, TX)
for DJ QBert, Jeremy Ellis, Table Manners Crew
Spinosaurus aegypticus was first discovered a century ago, but its type specimen was destroyed when the US bombed Berlin in WWII. We had no idea what this creature looked like, or how it lived, until another expedition recently discovered even more complete specimens. And the truth is weirder than anyone expected: Spinosaurus had a body specialized for living and hunting in a shallow freshwater environment: short, probably webbed hind legs, high nostrils, heavy bones to help it stay submerged...
We are talking about a fifty foot predator with a five foot head and claws longer than your foot. IT ATE SHARKS AND CROCODILES. AND while I MAY have taken artistic license with this painting, it might also have glowed with radiation...
2014 – oil & acrylic pens on canvas Original painting available – email with inquiries Painted at • 2014.11.05 – LANAI Rooftop Lounge (Austin, TX) for Create Culture
for Shanti Planti, BogTroTTeR, EazyT, Shuniya, Fractālà • 2014.11.19 – Empire Control Room & Garage (Austin, TX)
Art Seen Alliance, Fool's Gold Records, & Brainfeeder present Azizi Gibson, Kamandi, & Barnes
• Studio (Austin, Texas) 2014.09.30, 10.08, 11.04, 11.22-25, 12.01, 12.04
"They proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Fabergé Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and when you're shown one of these things, you look at it and you know, without a shadow of a doubt, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something from another dimension. It's like an artifact from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of God – such objects do not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it."
– Terence McKenna
More Thought-Provoking Articles at Globalish
I can't think of any other site that keeps its finger on the pulse while staying deep like Globalish. If you're the kind that wants both gorgeous videos and excellent companion text, we work for you:
Because if it doesn't cause permanent brain damage for innocent bystanders, it's not worth wearing.
On a slightly less hyperbolic note, you are in fact guaranteeing that you will become a walking conversation piece if you leave the house with this stuff on. With great power comes great responsibility.
“When you see the Earth from the Moon, you don’t see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.”
Happy Holidays, folks! I'm grateful for this life, even though I'm not the best at saying so. But while I'm exercising gratitude, let me extend it all the way to you for simply reading this. Knowing I have people getting something from my work is powerfully supportive. May this cold and stressful season open for you like a pomegranate to the recognition of a deeper self amidst the noise, blue sky beyond the leafless branches...
This week: a truly deep, weird, and wondrous sunrise meditation on guitar and pedals; my latest time-lapse video through Google Glass, which doubles as a manifesto for my fellow artists; new leggings, hoodies, shirts, and cases just in time to help Black Friday muddy the relationship between the sacred and profane; and a baker's dozen of new articles for Globalish, the writing gig that lets me wax poetic about cyborgs, psychedelics, yoga, travel, and a world of other awesome things.
Thanks again for reading and feel free to write me any time!
Misty late spring sunrise meditation music from a sacred grove, improvised and captured live in May 2014 in a geodesic dome at Flipside (Downtown, TX).
Hypnotic, glitchy instrumental ambience throughout which pulsing grooves and wisps of melody mysteriously flicker like ghost animals in the periphery...timeless forest music that explores an utterly unique and haunting tonal landscape, burning slowly and continuously shifting. An album made for traveling through states of consciousness, from quiet somnolence to twirling hypnagogia to urgent wakefulness, a mirror of the coming day.
For fans of Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, Daniel Lanois, Christopher Willits, Adrian Belew, Tortoise, Boards Of Canada, The Books...
On how to "plant a seed of liberation in the mind-stream of the viewer," to borrow a phrase from Alex Grey. On art's potential to change the world, set to the POV time-lapse video footage I took while painting "Manna Vesicles." Links to both the music and the full talk are here.
New Leggings, Hoodies, T-Shirts, & More
I'm grateful to announce that I have finally found someone to print my art on leggings! Seven new designs to grace your lovely stems are up at Artist Threads, as well as plenty of new goods at Ravenectar, Infinite Bit, and Nuvango.
Click pics for info/buying options on each new design – they're all on sale right now:
New Articles for Globalish.com
Globalish brings esoteric insight to the web's best videos. This is a different angle on the news – a deeper one, exploring our new planetary self emerging in the intersections between cultures. Here are my latest articles:
"In order to fight a network and win, you have to oppose it with an even more robust and fluid network." – Tea Faerie
I'll keep it brief this time and let the content do the speaking. Super grateful for you – to have an audience, to know my work is helpful, that it's provoking and inspiring people. Change is in the air...I hope it's empowering you, sculpting you into a better person – and I hope that my words, music, and imagery can help you hold the vision through that change.
Stay in touch if you have any questions or feedback. I'd love to hear from you.
love,
Michael
~ Super Ridiculous $10 Print Sale ~
I'm about to flush roughly half of the 200+ live art prints out of my online merch shop – and I'm giving everyone an opportunity to purchase FOR THE LAST TIME any of my work dating back to 2007 before I prune these overgrown art archives down to fighting trim.
Until May 15th, every single one of them will be only $10 apiece – now's your chance to scoop up anything you like from my entire history as a painter. I'll be posting pics from the "cut" pile every day at this facebook event until that day. Now is your chance to plumb my archives and score yourself some vibrant, inspirational, healing live art at a price most artists would find insulting...
You can check out all of my available 11"x17" poster prints here. Thanks for taking a look!
My friend, Australian journalist Rak Razam, interviewed me on his recent visit to Austin, and this is what happened – a really fun, exciting conversation – enjoy!
A guided tour of evolutionary hyperspace with paleontologist-poet-philosopher Michael Garfield. How do we communicate the Big Ideas that matter, that can help us survive in the changing paradigm we find ourselves in? Garfield offers a long and provocative burst of synaptic ideation that explores ideas like: mind viruses, transparency-surveillance culture, the technocratic priestcraft, Buckminster Fuller, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, machine super intelligences, Big Mama vs. Big Brother, psychedelics, fembots, romancing Skynet, cryptocurrencies, wearable computing, having sex on Google Glass, cyborg anthropology, mesh networks and the bit torrenting of culture, open source power redistribution, the war on transhuman consciousness, and surfing the wave of chaos...
My newest point-of-view #liveart time-lapse video, filmed through Google Glass- turning surveillance technology into the instruments of art - and dropping an ecstatic riff on improvisation and how to surf the changes...
"Old dogs may not learn new tricks, but the human brain retains its ability to learn and play for as long as we live. And that this is an especially useful trait, because the world we have created for ourselves is one in which everything is just going WAY too fast to believe that it's going to stay the same..."
~ Wear A Painting On Your Head ~
I love making paintings you can wear on your walls – after all, the home is an extension of the self, and where does the body really end? But you can't take your house with you for a night on the town – yet – so it's a real treat for me to make this functional art that keeps your head warm and dry and inspires like-minded strangers to come talk to you.
Click to take a closer look at these high-resolution pictures, and drop me a line if you'd like one of your own (or want me to paint something else – I'm receptive).
One of my favorite things about living in the future is how quickly ideas become real objects. My friend Jamie Greene of Biomorphics produced a small run of these lovely pins from my album art for 21st Century Romance – from hand sketch to digital fractal to laser engraving program to totally nontoxic (zero volatile organic compounds) swag made from renewable materials, just like that! They're super light, deliciously textured, and come with a free digital download of my latest and most powerful recordings in almost any file format you can imagine. Only 100 in the world. :)
"Elites aren't defined by birth or wealth, they are people with a project, individuals who want to do work they believe in, folks seeking to make an impact. Averaging down everything we do so that it becomes cheap and ubiquitous and palatable to all is a hollow goal."
I'm just going to apologize right now for overloading you with awesome new stuff over the next couple of weeks. This year finds me on an incredible creative roll and I feel like I'm doing my best work ever, faster than ever before.
If you don't have time to read this whole newsletter – and I certainly understand if that's the case – then please watch this time-lapse live painting video, download this free live album, and check out this sweet painted fedora. I'll have more videos and music and artwork I am proud to share with you next week. Feel free to reach out to me with your own artwork, or questions, and have a beautiful day!
Oh, and also! If you know of any festivals I should play this year, please let me know. I still do all of my own booking, it's hard work, and I can use all of the help I can get. I really appreciate your input.
I finally made good on my promise to Google Glass to film my live painting #throughglass and share the video. Here is that time-lapse – taken while painting "Inner Light" at Rootwire Festival and the Dallas Be:Tribe Gathering in 2013 – along with a preview of my forthcoming electronic guitar album (which you can preorder here) and a bit of a manifesto-rant on the importance of taking something home with you from your festival experience...
My buddy Jamie Greene at Biomorphics is helping me make these delicious laser-engraved 2" pendants for the physical release of my forthcoming album, 21st Century Romance, to be released on March 4th. (The pics above are of the prototype...I'm open to your feedback on whether this would be better with a leather cord or pin backings so you can wear it as a hat pin.)
Heart-spearing pathos, virtuosic fingerstyle acoustic guitar, and ecstatic live electronic improvisation come together in this definitive live recording of my set at Whip In on January 9th, 2014 – the belated second anniversary of my first concert in Austin (and birthday party for me, David Bowie, Elvis Presley, and Stephen Hawking).
This album features two new live looping improvisations as well as the first public performance of the song "Signal," first-ever recordings of "Really," "Gatecrashing," and a new guitar arrangement of the fan favorite, "It Hurts So We're Not Dead." A true landmark recording in my development as a performing singer-songwriter and avant-guitarist.
Written, Performed, Recorded, & Mixed by Yours Truly – Released 7 February 2014
2012 07 27 The Parish (The Nadis Warriors, Paul Basic, Metranohm)
2012 08 04 Frank (Sheer Khan and the Space Case, Henry and the Invisibles)
2012 08 16, 18 Rootwire Festival
(Papadosio Live PA, Futexture, Kaminanda, Mazeguider, Random Rab)
2014 01 21, 22, 31 Studio
This painting hung on my wall in its original formfor over a year...and I just hated, hated looking at it. Every piece goes through its awkward adolescence, but sometimes I think it's done when it's actually not, and then eighteen months later I get fed up, take it down, and work on it until I'm finally satisfied looking at it. No compromise! I'm happy with this piece, now.
If you live in Austin you can go check it out, along with a few other pieces, in its new temporary home at Lunar Mattress on South Congress. What? Yes. This furniture store is also an art gallery. :)
New Painted Hats
Now that I am refusing Bassnectar commissions, hat work has been a little slower-going. Sigh. Come on, people! I want to do something totally unique and YOU. You'll be glad in twenty years you challenged me with something different that grew along with your musical tastes. (No offense to Lorin, whose work I admire. But a man can only draw so many bass drops before he goes mad.)
If you'd like a hat, drop me a line. You're helping me pay rent, and I love to beautify your domes.
Taking A Cosmic Perspective at Gratifly 2013 Videos
If you'd prefer to listen, you can download the audio from these talks right here. But if you want to feel like you were there, these videos capture that morning-after glow we were all feeling...
"When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments."
How is 2014 treating you guys? Me: superconducting creativity like graphene, transparent to my own motives and desires like glass, but under a lot of pressure like diamond. The Year of the Horse is already off to a gallop, with some amazing new gigs – including tonight's show at The Scottish Rite Theater in Austin, doing a special A/V performance with Topher Sipes after the screening of my friend Rak Razam's ayahuasca documentary. Here are a few more to look forward to in the next month:
I will of course record as much as possible to share with all of you who can't make it there in person. And now on to all of the goodies I have for you this week! Enjoy, and stay in touch...
One of the most awesome conversations I've ever had! My friend Bill Ottman at Minds.cominvited me to help him curate an all-star panel discussion with stem cell researcher and complexity theorist Neil Theis, information scientist and sci-fi professor Richard Doyle, religious scholar and culture critic Erik Davis, and historian and all-around badass Mitch Mignano.
Our 110-minute conversation ranged from whether the universe is alive to the implications of open-source software in government, the consciousness of subatomic particles to the the spiritual consequences of Fukushima. If you want to blow your mind, make some time to watch this.
I was honored to participate in this amazing benefit compilation. From my friends at LostinSound:
LostinSound.org is happy to announce our V/A Winter Compilation of 2014. This collection features an eclectic track list from 21 of today's most talented and relevant producers. Our winter edition brings something completely new and different to the table, so wash your hands, and get ready to feast on a royal banquet of unreleased material.
We’d like to thank each and everyone of these artists for their tremendous contribution towards this compilation, and their continued support of Lost in Sound as a collective. A special mention goes out to Jacob Unmess for designing the unbelievable cover art for this season’s compilation. 25 limited edition 11x17 prints are available in the "Merch" section of this page.
For the first time ever, we are encouraging but not requiring donations. 100% of these donations will be given to an incredible organization entitled “Transform Relief.” After the most severe typhoon in recorded history hit the Philippines last November, hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes and lack access to food or fresh water. Transform Relief is not only bringing radical aid but empowering people to grow their own food using sustainable practices, and non-GMO, fast growth seeds. We will publish a full feature tomorrow when the compilation is released.
We feel obligated to use our skills and our large networks of activated youth to help our brothers and sisters who are in great need. We’ve been given a chance as a collective to unify and aid in a way that transcends what any one individual could accomplish alone. So, if you feel moved, please donate when you download the compilation, be sure to get to know our ally's at Transform Relief.
Excerpts from the epic three-hour-plus, still-going-from-an-all-nighter rant I gave at Gratifly Festival in Avalon, South Carolina, 27 July 2013.
This talk is a map of the problematique - the tragedy and blessing of the human condition as it specifically manifests in an age of metamorphosis. Old worlds are dying and new worlds are being born. How do we navigate the change? By taking a cosmic perspective.
I wish I had the whole three hours for you...but due to the fact that this was recorded on my pocket digital camera, I was limited by the lifespan of my lithium batteries. Consequently the audio is also substandard, but I am nonetheless happy to share it. There's something magical about what came through in that place and time – exhausted and in love...
New Mind Folds
"Author & Inventor" (as it says euphemistically on the packaging) Alex Grey invented these modified blindfolds to let people experience total darkness with their eyes open. Perfect for simulating blindness or going on mental journeys in the daytime, Mind Folds are also a fun surface for me to practice my oil painting technique. Email me with your budget if you'd like one!
I do pretty much all of my work as a gift to the commons (that's you!) and am supported by people's donations – I'm now accepting Bitcoin as well as monthly subscriptions through Paypal on my homepage – but if you want to help me stay afloat as an artist and get something cool out of the deal, here are some options for you:
Thanks for reading! Stay in touch and have a beautiful day...
Landing from another three month tour's been really difficult. There's no use in hiding that the life I've chosen is full of its own unique hardships – like financial insecurity, endless car repairs, and coming home to new property managers changing everything about the one "stable" place I know. I can talk about change all I like, but like most people I struggle to embody it.
I've loved dedicating my blood, sweat, and tears to festival culture for the last six years but I have to wonder what more I could be doing with my life. There must be some way to make a bigger impact in the world, to serve more people with my gifts.
This blog goes out to 7,000 people, now. I want to hear from you and learn what I can do to make my presence in your life more meaningful, inspiring, and useful than it is. What could I be doing better? How can I repay you for your time and your support? Let me know.
...And while you're pondering that, I'll just keep doing what I love. Here are two of my finest essays yet; a fierce new free live EP from Burning Man; and some fun new merchandise for supporters of my Indiegogo campaign:
It takes a special kind of person to be a live painter. It’s one of these emergent 21st Century art forms that remix performer and audience – exposing the mystique of the artist and inviting everyone else into the party. Most of us are used to – maybe even tired of – explaining what we’re doing to unfamiliar fans and promoters. Being an artist is weird enough; but being a live painter requires a person to actually thrive on the combination of fear and wonder that people inevitably bring to encounters with the strange. (Read more.)
This campaign is about so, so much more than shiny new stuff – that's all just there to subsidize the deeper and more meaningful work I'm doing to start meaningful conversations about our rapidly-changing world.
And last week I hosted a public chat on Tawkers, a really cool site for social discourse, about all of this. You can read the archived conversation here: "Art & Spirit in The Age of Surveillance."
On that note...I promised all of you a new essay series combining my twin passions for the past and future, and here it is – part one of my paleontology/transhumanism remix:
New dimensions unfurled and into them grew an exponential burst of minds and bodies, urged by necessity into new games of sight. Endowed with the radical new ability to detect at a distance, the naïve ecologies of Earth accelerated into unprecedented combinations of locomotive swimming chasers and chased. Simple musculatures adapted to navigate new axes, to maneuver. Surveillance – literally, "to watch from above" – was born...and animals like Anomalocaris were the black helicopters of the prehistoric ocean. (Read more.)
This year marks my second stint as the official music for Center Camp Café's aerial fabric dance showcase at Burning Man. (Here are twovideos from 2011.) They get up there on aerial silks and dazzle a captive audience; I hang out on the ground and improvise a live electronic soundtrack to their movement on guitar and effects. Earth Song For Sky Dance.
Think Boards of Canada meets instrumental Nine Inch Nails. Can you hear the dust in my pedals? :)
This is just the first of several performances I'll release for free this fall. Something happened to me this summer and I feel like my live sets are suddenly much groovier, more textured, and passionate. I'm opening new portals with this whole cyberguitar thing, and really look forward to sharing the best of my shows from Gratifly, Rootwire, Fractal Planet, and Scoot Inn with you all soon. In the meantime, enjoy this one...it's a quickie but I like it.
I recorded video through Glass while playing, so you can get a sense for how dizzying it is to try and operate a guitar, all of those pedals, and keep an eye on my collaborators while I'm playing. Apologies in advance for the vertigo.
This is my favorite festival of fall, each year, and one of the highest artist/guest ratios of any of them year-round. I'll be performing on the spectacularly beautiful laser-cut Folk It Up stage late night on Saturday and giving a talk on "Entertainment as Social Action" in the Pavilion on Saturday afternoon, as well as making an increasingly-rare live painting appearance with Third Coast Visions, the art collective my friends and I started here in Texas.
