LostInSound Compilation | Minds.com Panel Discussion | My Talk From Gratifly Festival | New Mind Folds

"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." 

– Marshall McLuhan, 1970

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:

7 February 2014 - Austin, TX - Mindzai Printing
Third Coast Visions Art Collective Show – Live Collaborative Mural
Cyberacoustic Guitar w/ Live Visuals by Topher Sipes

8 February 2014 - Austin, TX - The Parish
Live Painting for Desert Dwellers, Futexture, Cactus Bath

15 February 2014 - Austin, TX - Cenote
Love Songs For Solo Percussive Guitar, 7 - 9 pm, Free All Ages Show

15 February 2014 - San Marcos, TX - Tantra Coffeehouse
Cyberacoustic Guitar set w/ ARTheism, Hair Farmers, Grace Park, & Violinda

(Texas Wild Rice Festival Fundraiser Show)

6 - 8 March 2014 - Kerrville, TX - Head For The Hills Festival
Cyberacoustic Guitar, Live Painting & more, Details TBA

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...

"Complexity, Culture, & Consciousness"

A Minds.com Panel Discussion

Watch & Read the Companion Chat on Google+

One of the most awesome conversations I've ever had!  My friend Bill Ottman at Minds.com invited 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.

LostInSound Winter Compilation 2014

Download it Here & Support Disaster Relief in the Philippines

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.

My Talk From Gratifly Festival 2013

Stream & Download it Here for Free
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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!

Check it out on FB

Check it out on FB

Merchandise

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...

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...

Live at Burning Man 2013 | Interview w/ Rich Doyle | New GRC Embroidered Flatbill | New Pins & Custom Hats | Life In The Glass Age

“The zen tradition has this great saying, ‘Here comes the hearth god, looking for the fire.’ You’re looking everywhere for the fire, and it’s in you. and when you start to find it in yourself, others find you.”

– Richard Doyle

I turned 30 this year on January 8th – sharing a birthday with Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking, among others.  Big shoes to fill – which is why this year I'm focused on bigger and more meaningful projects than ever before.

Here are the first preliminary echoes of those great works to come.  Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

I Miss You And It's Okay: Live at Burning Man 2013

Free/Pay-What-You-Like Digital Download

55 minutes of dreamy, compelling electronic guitar improvisations inspired by and infused with playa magic. Recorded at Burning Man's Center Camp Café and Fractal Planet Village , this hour of multi-channel looping improvisations on guitar, voice, and hardware effects is the alchemical transmutation of enthusiasm, playa dust, and sheer PATHOS into the angelic psychofluid captured here as a trace fossil for your appreciation.

Recommended listening environment: sprawled out on carpet, couch, or bare earth while making love or waiting for inspiration to strike.  Dedicated to the dream woman for whom I spent long years searching, a fantasy I finally released by fire in this year's Temple.

Download it here and enjoy the ride...

My Chat with Sci-Fi Professor Richard Doyle

Stream/Download Here

Richard Doyle is now Professor of Information Science, Rhetoric, and Science Fiction at Penn State and author of a trilogy on emergent forms of knowledge, the latest and most acclaimed of which is the epic treatise, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noösphere – probably the finest example yet of 21st Century “psychedelic” writing.

The latest in my SolPurpose.com series of visionary-yet-personal dialogues with various inspirational thinkers, we focused on how human exploration is turning once again to the inner frontiers of consciousness.  Doyle's love for language shone through for our whole conversation.  Here are a few clips:

“Our brains have been the frontier of capitalism for the last twenty years, of which the internet is just one manifestation, and the pharmaceuticalization of everything is the other. It’s like we’re on the border of Oklahoma in the 19th century and the gunshot goes, and everybody goes to stake their claim – it’s like the inner realm is that space, now.”

“We don’t need to create another identity politics around evolving consciousness. Because that’s how we won’t evolve consciousness. But we do need other like-minded souls…to help us by verifying, and debugging, and debunking all the stuff we’re working through as all this stuff continues to unfold.”

Read more & listen at SolPurpose.

"Compass Mandala" Pins by MG x KolorSpun

Order yours here | View/Share on FB

1.8", gold-plated, double-posted enamel pins based on my live painting, "Compass Mandala #1" – each colorway (warm and cool) is laser-engraved in a numbered series of 250.  Preorders ship by January 24th.

MG x Herbivore x GRC Embroidered Flatbill

I think my new Grassroots California signature flatbill for Herbivore Designs must be the coolest hat I've ever made – and it damn well better be, because it took almost an entire year to get this most-complicated-design-ever prototyped and ready for sale!  I'm sure you can tell how much work went into this, from the original painted concept to the fully embroidered and sublimation-printed final product (which you can order here):

View on Instagram

View on Instagram

Limited series of 420 – grab yours while supplies last at Herbivore Designs.

I'm also still going strong with the custom painted hats.  Here are the latest – email me if you'd like details on getting one of your own:

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View/Share on FB

Join The Discussion: Technology, Art, & Consciousness

I also want you to join me in one of the most important conversations of our times.  Join Life in the Glass Age: Technology, Art, & Consciousness, my new social bookmarking club and discussion group:

We live in an age of accelerating change - not just of our technologies, but of our selves and societies. We define ourselves in relationship to our tools and each other – and as one of us changes, so do we all.  This group is for the exploration of the new worlds coming into being as powerful new knowledge technologies are born and we experience new permutations of old struggles: between privacy and accountability; freedom and security; access and permission.

Encouraged: Posts about the personal and social dimensions of sur- and sous-veillance, Big Data, augmented reality, wearable computing, the Internet of Things, etc. How are we changing - and how are we staying the same? How are we learning to make art out of our increasingly intelligent and responsive environments?  Critical perspectives welcome.

Everyone into the pool!  And thanks again for your support.