There is no path. The path is made by walking.

Traveller, there is no path

The path is made by walking.

Traveller, there is no road

Only wakes in the sea.

– Antonio Machado

Hey, everyone (weary smile). It's Spring, finally, and beautifully so. Some things are starting to feel like The Old Ways again and some never will. I hope this new work finds you well. I talk so much these days, I'll let the work speak for itself this time.

You can watch the time-lapse of my latest digital art explorations on Instagram, where I have also been playing the wonderful Chapman Stick almost every day, writing new short pieces that will fit the narrow format. It's an amazing instrument. It's kind of saving my sanity, lately. Speaking of which:

My most recent article to share with you, the first stabs at an essay for a compilation on the topic:

As artists, our improvisation with the dehumanizing algorithms of predatory surveillance capitalism is a kind of tango — an exploratory, open-ended, provisional, context-dependent, time-bound, blindspot-defined process of mutual adaptation. The economy — and the ecology of which it is a subset of dynamic interwoven agencies — is an evolutionary system, and evolution is improvisation via the appropriation of existing forms. The algorithms we design are just the visible tip of the algorithms we enact unwittingly, the action of distributed intelligence in a long, complex arms race with itself. The only way to win is to refuse the rules and act from true and nameless spontaneity.

Read the whole thing here.

My first concert in months! Freestyle explorations from within a tangled bank of musical electronics, far-out ideas, and intertwingled subjectivity, for your journeying pleasure. Live streamed on 2021.04.18 as part of the Mt. Tam Psychedelic Integration Jam, hosted and organized by Daniel Shankin, with a special live painting appearance by visionary artist Amanda Sage.

Download it for for free (or for tips) on Bandcamp or Patreon. Watch it on YouTube:

Also on YouTube: the full recordings from our recent Future Fossils Book Club discussions on Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta and Distress by Greg Egan, two of the coolest books I've ever read. We went deep!  I love the scrappy and profound community that has clustered around the conversations we have on the podcast. 

Subscribe to my YouTube channel to watch future book club recordings or become a Patreon supporter to participate in them yourself! Our next call will be on May 30th to talk about Dark Constellations by Pola Olaixarac, and then in June we're getting the author on the call to talk about Eric Wargo's Precognitive Dreamwork and The Long Self (!).

Meanwhile, excellent Future Fossils episodes continue to trickle out every two weeks:

That's "all" for now. Thank you for reading and for being. Reach out any time. Be well...

Until we meet again, here is where I put all of the cool new music I discover:

And where I sell art prints and original paintings — proceeds go directly to feeding children:

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

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🎉 Happy New Year! Lasers + Dinosaurs + Singularities

Now that we're TRULY over the rainbow...

Happy New Year, everyone!  My birthday comes two weeks after Christmas, so this time of year is always hopeful and uplifting in spite of — or rather in juicy harmony with — the vibe of wintry contemplation, holiday burnout, and bare-treed, sky-wide reflections on time, life, and everything.  02020 gave us all so much to think about and learn from, recover from and build on.

Like I imagine you are, I'm looking forward into 02021 a little battle-worn but clarified and eager to explore some new horizons. This year is going to be different — I'm not quite sure yet how, but I am always grateful for this moment when our culture calls us to reach into mystery and possibility each year. And in the meantime, I have a trove of unpublished work I'm eager to share in the months to come.

Thanks from the bottom of my heart to everyone who bought a painting in my moving sale and helped us fix up and furnish our new family home!  Still some time left to contribute and score art at wholesale prices — I have just a handful of originals remaining, and I'm at work on a raft of new small studio pieces, but I'm also open for commissions — email me with inquiries.

And now here are a few new things. More soon. See you in the Future Fossils Discord Server...!

Love,

Michael

"Urvogel" (First Bird) Archaeopteryx Wood Ornaments

I made these on my Glowforge as Christmas gifts — short philosophical musing below on what it feels like to try and translate the analog uniqueness of painting to this digital medium.

They're not currently available for sale but I'm happy to talk about commissioned laser-enabled designs, if you're interested! Scheming about additional perks for Patreon supporters and happy to take suggestions for the best possible applications of my artwork to laser cut and engraved merchandise.

Sometimes I think there must be something like ASMR for eyeballs, looking at very tiny things or seeing things in neat rows, that satisfies the brain's prediction reward circuitry and is partly responsible for the mechanized aesthetic that dominates modernity. It feels like an ironic hijack of biophilia and our biologically innate love of forms like tree branches and river deltas: the fractal order of our evolved life-world swapped out for a lower-dimensional shadow of the ancient mystery of reproduction.
Walter Benjamin explored this, and asked about what sacredness still lives in mechanically-duplicated art forms, in his most famous essay; WJT Mitchell updated that essay for our biocybernetic century. And as technology evolves according to the same rules as everything else, it looks and acts more and more like the kind of living systems we're used to: dynamic, mutable, branching, turbulent, unpredictable. 

Something of that was captured in these laser cut Archaeopteryx ornaments I made to break in my Glowforge this year — like (but admittedly much simpler than) printing Leeloo in The Fifth Element, seeing row after row of echoes of one of the world's most unique and precious fossils feels to me like a portal into a future in which human and nonhuman life alike becomes both more ephemeral and priceless, and we develop a more nuanced understanding of individuality and selfhood.

(When you can be copied like any other computer file, what makes you unique? Your context. Your history. What cannot be copied. See also Westworld, which I discussed with Michael Phillip way back in Episode 14 of Future Fossils Podcast, and Episode 65 with John David Ebert and I unpacking the mythical and spiritual themes of Blade Runner 2049.)
Anyway...

Mid-Singularity Trialogues with Ramin Nazer & The Teafaerie

Listen anywhere you go for podcasts.

Reporting from mid-singularity, friends and returning guests Ramin Nazer, The Teafaerie, and I run for several full-court passes on augmented reality, telepresence, simulation theory, the science fiction of Charles Stross and Hannu Rajaniemi, how to enjoy the rapids of change, and much more.

If that doesn't satisfy your thirst for weird sh*t, go listen to more about virtuality, artificial consciousness, and neuroscience, in my appearance on the Voices in the Dark podcast.

Book Club Recordings Now Free For Everyone

ICYMI I've made all of the Future Fossils Podcast Book Club recordings entirely free, moving them from behind the Patreon paywall so everyone can appreciate the deep and illuminating discussions we've had about some of the coolest books I've ever read. Enjoy!

Follow My Chill 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!

Follow me elsewhere:

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

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