Cooped-Up Creativity: New Music • Psychedelic Eggs Galore • Future Fossils Episodes with Erik Davis & Nora Bateson

“The way we discuss what needs to be done now will shape what it is possible to do. This is not a moment to fix a machine, this is a moment to compose new cultures.”

- Nora Bateson

Hey friends,

If you're feeling lonely, cooped up, or just in need of some smart conversations, I hope you'll join some of my friends and I for the weekly casual video hangouts we've been having every Sunday.  We've been talking about all kinds of things in light of our unprecedented situation: philosophy, economics, personal creative process, family life... We're having two more of these open discussions on 19 & 26 April at 2 pm Mountain. If it'd help you, I hope you'll join us. Details here.

And now, here's all of the new creative work I've bled into lately, for the benefit of everyone.

My love to all of you. Stay safe and happy, and don't forget to ask for help.

best,

Michael

New Single: Always Catching Up

Listen anywhere you go to stream music.

Or download the lossless audio for free at Bandcamp.

My next album continues to ooze forth at approximately one song per four months. Songwriting and production is the one place in my life where I can create art selfishly, uncompromisingly, obsessed, and etch away at lovingly-crafted intricate and living works for months or years, feeling all the while as if I'm swept up in The Great Work.

The first two songs of this as-yet-unnamed, long overdue LP are here, along with their backstories.

Here's the latest tune, on time and mind, as well as lyrics and the story of its very psychedelic origins.

Walking, according to physiologists, is a controlled fall forwards.

Toddling to tottering, all of us are always one step from and one step toward.
But life's just like that. Languages grow at the rhythm of walking pace,
and every idea you inhabit is seconds behind your Original Face...

Four New Spring Paintings

Here are four smaller (12") paintings I've cooked up in the last couple cooped-up weeks. No names for any of these. Top two on stretched canvas, bottom two on cradled artboard. Check my Instagram for different angles/lighting/context. Each one is up for grabs; I won't make prints.

Commercial break: now is a great time to buy art, because the artists need support and deals abound. If you have ever wanted to own a piece of mine, drop me a line. I will be glad to show you what I've got and give you a post-apocalyptic (half or more off) discount...

 

 

And now, two awesome conversations that I hope will help you make good sense of life right now:

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 140

Listen & Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

We’re extra lucky to have not one but three amazing guests this week: culture critic and religious scholar Erik Davis, philosopher and author Tony Blake, and trickster historian Mitch Mignano. A deep dive into the mythic and mystical dimensions of our moment — including nonhuman agency, the virus as teacher, Pan and panic and pandemics, solutionism isn’t the solution, the danger of efficiency logic, and a media diet for meditation on the darkness of nature.

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 141

Listen & Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

This week’s guest is Nora Bateson, Director of the International Bateson Institute, author, film-maker, and founder of the Warm Data Lab. Nora is a magician when it comes to getting people to live the relational and dynamic, the embodied and incompressible. I’m honored that we got to sit down for a US-Sweden Zoom call and talk about how current world events touch down in the messy and beautiful everyday.

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems,

and Creative Opportunity

Read my new piece at Medium.

A transcript of Episode 139 in which I rant about our situation from the POV of an armchair systems thinker and weird artist, invoking everyone from Alan Moore to Charles Eisenstein:

"The best possible outcome I can imagine from this is to witness all of the creative and intelligent people who have been shackled to pointless, stupid, undignified work for our entire lives rise up and create something new and beautiful together. Emergencies often elicit the best of our humanity, a concern for the true priorities of our existence. These are moments when we are called to act on what really matters, and to contribute to our communities and to the legacy that we pass on, at a time when good ideas are unusually quick to spread."

ICYMI: Free Coloring Book!

Get your coloring on!

No strings attached at all, but I do hope I'd get to see your pages when you color them!  (Pictured: my friend's kid going ham on some trippy doodles.)

And that's that.  Thank you for digging in.  I hope that you and yours are safe and happy...

Making Sense of the Pandemic • Free Coloring Book • New Music & Paintings

"The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past.” 

– Lewis Thomas

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems, and Creative Opportunity

While in enforced isolation due to a plague, college student Isaac Newton devised our modern theories of both optics and gravity. What will YOU do with your social distancing?

This opportunity for a new creative chapter is upon us at all levels, right now. Our national and global systems were stuck on suboptimal solutions and have demonstrated their inability to handle the complex and evolving crises of our emerging planetary culture. We now have a chance to break out, dream up local answers in massive parallel, and come back together in a stronger, more resilient (and antifragile) place than where we started.

Here's a short audio essay on how to make sense of this in light of complex systems research, with dozens of links to useful information in the show notes. Hope it helps.

For those of you with a sudden surplus of free time, I've decided to freeware the previously patrons-only Future Fossils Coloring Book for your enjoyment. It's a 25-page PDF of trippy doodles (some abstract, some of a natural history persuasion) that you can print out or color on a tablet. My only request is that I get to see some of the finished results!

If you want the "full experience," here are hours and hours of free music for your streaming pleasure, with a confirmed track record of facilitating awesome art sessions:

Spotify • Bandcamp • Soundcloud (fewer tracks there compared to the other two)

And now onto some new art!

I painted the top two pieces in collaboration with Jamie Baldwin Gaviola (@flowstatepaint on Instagram). She started the top two and mailed them to me to finish, and then I had a wild hair to "breed" the two paintings. My daughter had her first birthday this week and in the weeks leading up, the two paintings Jamie started seemed reminiscent to me of my partner (the softer pastel sunburst grid one) and myself (the edgier and bolder peacock circuitboard one). The third painting, the square of blobby motion and expressive dynamic gooeyness in the middle, is unquestionably our child.

But of course no symbol can be contained by a single interpretation, even for one (honest) person, and as with all artwork, new layers and associations will undoubtedly reveal themselves over time.  The "daughter" painting was finished the night I also completed a new studio arrangement of a song I've been kind of "pregnant" with for the last several years, a song that first started taking shape the week my partner moved to Austin to live with me in 2014 and I got lost in the Texas Hill Country on ayahuasca (but that's another story). That song, "Always Catching Up," has a lot to do with the network latencies in our nervous systems and how we're always responding to a state of the world that has already transformed into something else. 

When I first played the scratch mix of the studio track for my friends in Santa Fe, the only visible star turned out to be Aldebaran, which is associated with the Archangel Michael and with militant peacocking. It seemed like I was being drawn back into the synchronicity vortex that subsumed me for over a month in 2017 leading up to the release of the Pavo LP & Martian Arts EP (I talk a little bit about that particular Chapel Perilous in the public liner notes to those two releases). Anyway, the latest canvas finished itself that night, and now here we are.

All three of these paintings are available for sale, or if you're playing it safe with your money still want a copy, they're available as cardstock and canvas prints in my shop (Jamie and I split proceeds).

Peacock Circuitboard: Prints & Original

Sunrise Grid: Prints & Original

Aldebaran: Prints & Original

Back on Tour, BioHorror, DeepFakes, Cosmic Evolution, Psychedelic Therapy, World Travel & Space Exploration

I'll keep this brief.

In summer 2017 I wrote a story about how AI would change the very nature of reality. I shared it with some friends and read it as an episode of Future Fossils, but I never tried to get it published. Then it started coming true, and I knew that I had to get it out there while we still live in a world in which the categories "real" and "fake" still make some sense.

Now folks are sharing it on Twitter. I heard today that it's effective horror. I hope it helps prepare you.

Here it is:

An Oral History of the End of 'Reality'

(Artwork licensed by Giacomo Carmagnola.)

If you find non-fiction easier, here is an essay about our accelerating evolutionary arms race with deep learning AI fakery, and why it matters that we start to take these matters seriously:

Welcome to the End of Reality: Living in a #Deepfake World

(This is not actually a conversation between Jeff Goldblum, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor, Robert Downey, Jr., and George Lucas. Allow me to explain.)

–––––   New Artwork   –––––

Since most of you signed up to see new paintings and an artless update might be mild betrayal, here are the collaborations that I'm working on with friends across the country, after baby goes to sleep.

None of these are done, but they're all getting close. If you want any of them, let me know...

This first one is a 24" canvas with Gregory Pettit that we started just before I moved to Santa Fe:

These next two are small (16") collabs with Jamie Gaviola. 

She began them both and shipped them to me to complete:

I feel extremely lucky to be working with these artists, both of whom are not just masters of their craft but awesome people. Check out their other work!

(And, obviously, follow me on Instagram to see more updates as we finish these and other pieces.)

–––––   New Podcasts   –––––

I know I always say this, but it's true: Future Fossils just keeps getting better, and I am convinced these latest episodes are some of the best yet. Here's what you've probably been missing:

 

 

The Future Fossils Book Club just had an AWESOME conversation about Borne, Jeff VanderMeer's amazing postapocalyptic biohorror novel, which remixes "cute" and "weapon," "enemy" and "family," and makes us ask important questions about personhood and love and beauty.

Next up we're discussing VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, so get in here and join us!

(Artwork licensed by Pat Hughes.)

–––––   Upcoming Gigs   –––––

I haven't traveled much since I became a father, but if you're in Austin or Phoenix this month maybe we will see each other! I'll be playing music and giving a talk at Cosmic Music Festival in Mesa, Arizona on March 28th and speaking on complex systems and society at the SXSW Interactive party for EFF-Austin (March 14th) and hosting a live Future Fossils Podcast at The Technodelic Temple for Andromeda Entertainment (March 17th).

More info at the links below: