New Chill-Out EP + 1:1 Print Series • My Cataract: An Initiation • Upcoming Show in Santa Fe • Custom Hats Are Back!

Life has handed me some lemons, lately. This is my lemonade:

New Instrumental Cyberguitar EP Ephemeropolis

EP & Album Art @ Bandcamp

"Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe, and any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down, and to set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."

- William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature

I've been thinking A LOT lately about home, loss, wandering, fugitivity, transience, and the "new normal" of being forever in transition. None of this is entirely new — these themes have pervaded my entire life — but they've really come to the forefront of my contemplations over the last year, bringing into focus how much of my work emphasizes the temporary and fleeting beauty of our lives. "Castles made of sand," as Jimi Hendrix put it. This latest release makes explicit what has always been implicit in my electroacoustic guitar work especially: the Heraclitean revelation that we never step in the same flow twice...

(So far feedback is unanimously positive; my friends are calling this "a real vibe" and "vibey as fök," if you can see a theme developing...)

It was grown in the summer sun, reaped and winnowed under moonlight, bundled and shipped on the autumnal equinox. It is the harvest from two hours of live performance, leavened and ready to bake in your ears to rise and make fractals in your brain. Recorded live at the Santa Fe Society of Artists pop-up gallery in downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico, on 27 August 2022. Improvised on guitar, voice, and electronics. Cover illustration prompted in Midjourney. Dedicated to the burners.

Listen to or purchase it at Bandcamp or add it to your playlists at Spotify or Apple Music.

40 Variations on "Ephemeropolis": An AI Art Collection

Browse & Collect @ MichaelGarfieldArt.com

Unique AI-generated variants for the new EP's cover art. Each variant will only be printed ONCE as an 11"x11" signed print on glossy cardstock; select your variant number at checkout and I will delete the option as soon as I have received your order, guaranteeing you will remain in perpetuity THE ONLY person with that print.

The series is comprised of 40 unique HD designs in total. Think of these as analog NFTs...it's an experiment exploring the fascinating intersection of digital abundance and artificial scarcity, a performance of the flickering and transient nature of the temporary cities from which the EP draws its name.

Every print comes with a free download of the EP in both WAV and MP3 (preview it on Bandcamp, Spotify, or Apple Music) AND a link to the image file itself, in case you ever want to replace the original due to damage.

PS — If you want to learn more about my work with, and philosophical musings about, AI artwork, dig into my blog and recent appearances on The Jim Rutt Show and Third Eye Drops Podcast.

New Future Fossils Episode 192 Gets Esoteric

Dig In & Read Extensive Show Notes

This week on Future Fossils I go solo and get reflective on age, noise, loss, mystery, stars and angels, dreams and seasons, modern science and the retrieval of magic...

Because I have a cataract. At age 38. What the hell?

cataract (n.) — early 15c., "a waterfall, floodgate, furious rush of water," from Latin cataracta "waterfall," from Greek katarhaktes "waterfall, broken water; a kind of portcullis," noun use of an adjective compound meaning "swooping, down-rushing," from kata "down" (see cata-). The second element is traced either to arhattein "to strike hard" (in which case the compound is kat-arrhattein), or to rhattein "to dash, break." Its alternative sense in Latin of "portcullis" probably passed through French and gave English the meaning "eye disease characterized by opacity of the lens" (early 15c.), on the notion of "obstruction" (to eyesight).

Join Me on October 14th Live in Santa Fe!

Learn More & RSVP

That's all I can say about this. I've wanted to play a show at Honeymoon since before the pandemic. Their kombucha is amazing. And my daughter is so excited to dance with me during my set, she talks about it every day. Even if it's cold that night, I'm glad to be outdoors for this because there's nothing like the sound of my guitar reflecting off of buildings, pulling in the unsuspecting passers-by, while I gaze into the distance at the Sangre de Cristo Mountains as they disappear into the gloaming. MMM.

If I can stream it live, I will.  Subscribe to me on YouTube if you want to know next time I'm live.

I'm Offering Custom Hats Again!

They're back! I was out of the business for years but am now making my custom-painted lids available, taking orders in time to bless up your holidays. I've painted 350 custom lids over the years and cherish the opportunity to make yours (or your loved one's) a totally one-of-a-kind fashion accessory you'll cherish for years to come. Learn more and order yours today.

Follow My Music Discovery Playlist

In parting, a reminder that I share the music that I find and love right here, and while this is a wildly diverse and very long collection you cannot deploy for a specific mood, I hope it serves as inspiration.

Ecodelic Explorations: AI Art + Arvo Pärt | Kant on Rationality | Evolutionary Adaptations I Love | Greater Than Code | Agency as Art

Hey everyone!  Lots of big moves lately on my end so here's the short of it:

1) I'm hugely expanding my offerings on Patreon, including providing access to HD images of all of my new digital art experiments to the $10 tiers and up.

2) I am, in the parlance of our times, "aping" into NFTs (at Rarible, Hic Et Nunc, Voice, and Mint Songs for starters).  Before you have a kneejerk reaction to this one way or another, it's part of my commitment to guinea pig myself with new media so I can learn their potentials and hopefully help empower other people to take the leap and/or make valid critiques.  I lost a lot of fans when I beta tested Google Glass, but it was SO important to my understanding of evolution and technology, and the role I could play in urgent discourse on these things, and I feel the same way about exploring NFTs.

(Accessibility matters and I don't want you to feel left behind, so please hit me up with questions or feel free to join the discussion we're having about this stuff in the Discord server.)

3) I'm moving the email newsletter from Substack to Revue and returning to biweekly updates, in part because it's unfair to you to keep sending out enormous entries like this one. Hopefully you agree that more bite-sized pieces are easier and more fun than dropping a six-foot sandwich once every 4-8 weeks.  

Thank you for sticking with me through these changes.  Continuing to make art, music, and writing while helping raise two new humans is insanely difficult and it means the world to me that we're on this journey together.

And now for as much new work as I feel okay to share at one time.  More music and paintings soon!

Experimenting with AI Art:  

"Future Fossils" Takes On A New Whole Meaning

It's always been my intention to fold more of what I do under the Future Fossils name, since the podcast is far from the only work that qualifies (as both a trace of present activity left to the future and a kind of presentiment or foreshadowing for later comprehension).

Lately, that's taken the form of two different styles of digital art exploration. This batch here is AI art (using VQGAN+CLIP on a pre-trained model), grown from text-based prompts using the titles of some of my favorite episodes.

This is so incredibly fun. I love collaborating with machines, feeding analog into digital into analog and back again, seeing what can be learned by taking the other's perspective on the self. This series (curated from a much larger pool of failures) are what I consider "hits" where the computer grokked the spirit of the episode, like those "intuitive" plays made by AlphaGo.

If you're interested in owning one of these as a unique (1:1) NFT, I've started minting my favorite generative art experiments on hicetnunc.xyz/futurefossils, which runs on the Tezos blockchain (which is approximately 2,000,000 times more energy efficient than Ethereum — you can read more about sustainability comparisons here and here).

More info on what you're looking at:

168 - Mikey Lion & Malena Grosz - Festival Time, Life-changing Trips, and Community in COVID

49 - Jake Kobrin - Sex, Death, and The Return of The Black Madonna
163 - Toby Kiers & Brandon Quittem - Bitcoin and Fungal Economies
69 - Tim Freke - The Evolution of The Imagination



57 - Conner Habib & Mitch Mignano - Occult Biology
171 - Eric Wargo - Precognitive Dreamwork and The Philosophy of Time Travel
100 - The Teafaerie - DMT, Transhumanism, and What To Do with All of God's Attention
176 - Richard Doyle, Sophie Strand, & Sam Gandy - Exploring Ecodelia: Myth, Magic, and Mycelium



120 - Ramin Nazer - Cave Paintings for Future People
160 - Stephen Hershey & Kynthia Brunette - His Dark Materials: Narnia, Fillory, and Coming of Age in The Multiverse
109 - Bruce Damer - The Origins and Future of Life
 91 - An Oral History of The End of "Reality"

Writing New & Old on Art, Philosophy, Evolution

Arvo Pärt’s minimalist soundscapes are a major feature of the 20th Century's musical terrain; his is a particularly windblown and barren, starkly beautiful land, with grand vistas and time-carved expanses.

Here are my nondual reflections on his work (an OLD piece from 2007, recently republished).

I also wrote a short love letter to one of my favorite turtles in Neo.Life, a magazine about synthetic biology founded by Jane Metcalfe of WIRED Magazine fame:

9 Evolutionary Adaptations We Love

And don't think I ever shared this five-minute lecture I gave at The Long Now Foundation's Ignite Talks last year, very much in the spirit of Terence McKenna:

Deepfakes and The Archaic Revival

Lastly, I recently appeared in The Santa Fe New Mexican by virtue of being the only person at the Santa Fe Institute to have ever used a Bitcoin ATM.

New Podcast Episodes (Both Home & Away Games)

I had a fabulous conversation on Greater Than Code earlier this year about the economically invisible work of true innovation and discovery...it got deep but stayed accessible.  Recommended.

And then more recently I joined my friend Michael Phillip on his show Third Eye Drops to discuss Immanuel Kant's ideas about rational enlightenment, and ask whether we're living in an age of False Enlightenment (spoiler: both of us think the answer is yes).

Lastly, I've had some AMAZING conversations on Future Fossils, recently:

Lastly: Prints & Original Paintings for Giving Season

Here's my print shop and here's my list of available original works.  Happy to offer unique arrangements to interested collectors — I would far rather you have one of these than for me to keep them hoarded in my studio!

"The dangers of life are infinite, and among them is safety."

—Goethe

New Painting + Digital Reworkings • Re: NFTS • Skytree @ Long Now Blog • Sand Talk Book Club • New Future Fossils

"Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be
saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in
any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore,
we are saved by love."
—Reinhold Niebuhr

Hello, dear friends (and long-running fond almost-strangers)! Life has been especially full this year so far and I apologize for taking 400% longer than advertised to get this update to you...hopefully it finds you well, and lands precisely where it nourishes you best.

I have A LOT of projects in the pipeline right now but here are some finished works worth sharing:

New Painting: "Party Time" + Digital Reworkings

As usual, I may be getting ahead of myself...but it just felt right to celebrate the end of 2020. Here's a fun, light-hearted moment of color in the weirdest, longest, most ominously-warm-and-dry winter I can remember — created the week of the Capitol riot, which feels humorously apropos.

Available — interested collectors, find more details in my shrinking master list of unsold paintings.

For several reasons, I've decided to slow down and stop offering open-series prints of every new piece...instead, I want to use the original paintings as starting points for remixes and reimaginings, letting them be the raw material for novel digital compositions in the same way my recent music has reworked live recordings into vastly deeper and more ambitious sound collages.

Here's a glimpse at how that works. I haven't decided how, precisely, I want to bring these to market yet, but here are some pieces that grew out of the painting above — really, just snapshots along a kind of improvisational random walk across an evolutionary landscape (see Future Fossils Podcast #161 below):

But digital work didn't used to hold much appeal for me, because you're kind of just "singing into the wind" until you impose some artificial scarcity (printing onto clothing, etc.). Which brings me to:

Yes, I Too Am Minting NFTs

Browse my available NFT artwork at Rarible

 

Like nearly every other artist you know, I've started minting Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), a blockchain-enabled new medium that (as just one promising example among many) allows creators to take control of their own digital rights management back from exploitative corporations.

(There's been a swirl of controversy around this extremely-hyped new technology, so if you're skeptical about this I invite you to dig into the thoughtful discussion I've been kindling on the issue on my Facebook profile here and here.)

I'm planning some really fun collaborative multimedia NFT projects with friends, but for the time being you can scope and bid on my first few 1-of-1 digital art tokens, each an animated version of one of my most popular paintings, at rarible.com/michaelgarfield.  I am very pleased to see these pieces transform with new flowing movement into works more perfectly representational of the psychedelic hyperspace from which they descended into my brain and down my arm onto the canvas.  Go check 'em out!

Long Now Feature on Skytree's Deep-Time Electronica

I was and am so pleased to interview my old friend Evan "Skytree" Snyder for The Long Now Foundation blog about how his meditations on deep have have inspired his electronic music and recent "geosonification" (using mineral specimens to drive modular synths).

Future Fossils Book Club on Tyson Yunkaporta's Sand Talk

Our last Future Fossils book club call, for Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta, was so good! Thanks especially to Naomi Most & Karja Cygni for contributing such wise reflections to our yarn on how the complex, embodied, relational, context-dependent Indigenous wisdom Yunkaporta performs for us in this work makes sense of violence, paradox, identity, time, nomadic versus sedentary living, and much more.

The video recording and our extensive collection of relevant external links are now up on Patreon.

Please share with anyone you think will benefit.

Hard-Hitting New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

I talk with an intensely-scientific ecumenical preacher about how to face radical climate change with grace and dignity; with two friends and fellow fantasy nerds about the profundity of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials; with Third Eye Drops host Michael Phillip about the mythology and biology of creativity; and with an evolutionary biologist and a Bitcoin entrepreneur about the analogy between digital currencies and mycelial networks.

I also published my first "mailbag" solo episode, in which I had immense fun answering listeners' questions about aliens, death, and making art:

And as far as other podcasts are concerned, I had a blast joining Chris Curran of the Podcast Engineering School for this conversation about the philosophical AND technical aspects of hosting and producing both my podcasts, Future Fossils and Complexity.

Follow My Spotify Playlist (Recommendations)

This is where I share all of the cool new music I discover. Chillout, electro-folk, acoustic instrumentals, avant-pop, film scores, and more — it is as everywhere as I am, but I hope that you agree it all coheres.

If you have tracks you'd like to add, please share them in the Future Fossils Discord Server!

Spotify | YouTube | Twitter | Instagram | Facebook | Soundcloud | Bandcamp

Send BTC: bc1qtm7tdxw0cfxey4dlagwjpqtqtt45dkh3m36vcq

Send ETH: 0xE88cF65257919A48Fd14cB327014eacc99F1A616

Send HELP (LOL): paypal.me/michaelgarfield | @futurefossils at Venmo

1.Buy House 2. Sell Art 3. Paint House + Stuart Davis + Mantis Aliens + Complex Systems Conversation

✨🎊 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT & MOVING SALE  🎊✨

Browse Available Paintings

Browse Paper & Canvas Prints

We bought a home in Santa Fe (!!!) and so I am putting all of my remaining original paintings and canvas prints up for sale at a negotiable discount in order to help my family afford the once-in-a-lifetime costs.

We love it here in New Mexico and after a very tumultuous life of move after move after move, I'm so grateful for the chance to make a steady and secure and lasting Nest of Peace and Creativity where I can host friends and family and make as much beauty, truth, and goodness as possible in all available media. But this is a daunting endeavor and it's taking all we have and more to make it work. We live as frugally as possible but still need to secure some basic amenities to make this transition comfortable. 

In short: 

If you would like to bring some color/love/deepweirdness into your own life, now is the best time ever!

Please drop me a line if you want to talk about acquiring any of my work. 

There are, of course, much easier ways to show support - like Patreon, Bandcamp, or Substack subscriptions, or Venmo transfers, or grabbing paper prints. I am immensely thankful to anyone who offers anything, and everyone who has, and I promise to show it by living up to my potential (like, for example, finally lighting up that laser cutter I have not had space to use since I acquired it! Oh yes, I have PLANS.).

That's all. Thanks for reading this. My love and blessings to you and you all. 💜🥳🎉

Epic New Podcast About Aliens

Listen Anywhere

I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain Stuart Davis. He’s been a guiding star for me and presumably many other irrepressibly nondisciplinary artists for over a decade, one of the founding figures of my adult psyche in its pluriform contortionism. Musician, painter, poet, talk show host, stand-up comic, film-maker, and depth psychologist, the man knows no bounds and it’s all I can do to follow closely and listen carefully, which I have since I first encountered his work in 2004.

Stuart is long overdue to be on the show, but the timing is perfect, because we’re here to talk about ALIENS. Not the admittedly excellent film, but the living reality of them and their astonishingly intimate relationship to us, as disclosed by the growing archive of guests on his show, Aliens and Artists.

We discuss the ethics of withholding advanced technologies like zero-point energy from the general public; Rick Strassman getting kicked out of his zendo for psychedelic research; circadian rhythms, sleep disruption for dream yoga, and parenting sleep deprivation psychosis; when Psyche argues with the Mantis; the self is a choir; daily banishings and welcomings; and why we implore you to only work with the visitors that respect human sovereignty.

I’ll stop now. Just listen and be amazed.

PS – My two-part interview is up on Aliens and Artists now as well. I haven't heard the final product yet because of all the things, but word is it's a banger. 📣🔥🎶🐙

~ Man Meets Mantis ~

Since we're having fun being weird,

Get Prints

This is my first ever collaboration painting with Ada Taylor Garfield, my daughter:

It's dedicated to Stuart, obviously, and available for sale, I suppose, but honestly I'll be surprised (albeit delighted) if anyone bites. Who are you? People who learn the intimate weirdo stories of my paintings sometimes get all "but I can't take your holy object" on me. Ultimately, though, I let them go and if they stay it's meant to be. But this one's definitely special: Ada drew the grass with the blue marker.

Know someone who might benefit from an awkwardly intense mantis reminder? Prints are all yours.

And One More (Awesome) Thing

Watch on YouTube

Last month as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds — complex systems researchers Tom Carter, Jenn Huff, Pietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan— and discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

It was awesome. I hope you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed participating.

Ironic Reminder: You Don't Have To Move

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

Hi Friends,

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

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

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

Don’t hesitate to write.

Love,

Michael

Music • Paintings • Essays • Talks

New Painting: “A Very Giger Easter”

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

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

More close-up pictures on my Instagram.

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

Help Navigating Radical Uncertainty

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

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

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

Join Our New Discord Server

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

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

New Future Fossils Episodes

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

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

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

Go Deeper