A.I. Art Eruption: The Wildest Period of My Art Career is Right Now (Plus New Music, Podcasts, Public Talks, & Thoughts on Human-Tech Co-Evolution)

I finally surrender to letting these roughly-monthly updates be a magazine unto themselves. This one is about a very hot topic right now: the explosion of A.I.-assisted artwork that you've surely seen sprouting up all over the Web, and my experimentation with it. I've always believed that the future would empower "professional dreamers" to share their inner worlds instantaneously, and it feels like that vision is finally substantiating itself in our waking world. But not all is rosy in this magical future, and I'm honored to help act as psychopomp on the River of Souls we're crossing together as these new tools mature and transform society.

But first, an announcement for the thousands of you in my active online fora:

✨ Big Changes for Future Fossils!

After years of volunteering dozens of hours a week in a patrons-only Facebook group and Discord server mostly populated by free riders, I'm finally clearing out the non-patrons and restoring some focus and sanctity to the community we've built together. Spending so much time moderating non-subscribers has been taking time away from podcast production and my family, but I also don't have the heart to just nuke this group. If you'd like to stay involved please consider signing up for at least $2 a month for the part-time job it is to curate and moderate this group.

Let me clarify that old close friends, former guests of the show, and other people who routinely and consistently add value to this group are welcome to remain regardless of whether you're contributing financially. There are many ways to do this, so if you're broke but interested in staying involved please respond to me privately.

✨ There Is No One Path Forward: Pluralism in Science, Philosophy, & Art

A digestible, albeit light-speed, six-minute-and-forty-second talk on the virtues of and need for pluralism, presented at Creative Santa Fe's Pecha Kucha Talks last month. 

You can find their (audio-and-slides-only) presentation on the Pecha Kucha website, or find my own video recording and extensive supplementary notes and resources on Patreon.

Abstract:

Biodiversity is the measure of ecological health. Cognitive diversity is the secret to innovation and effective collaboration. And contrary to popular belief, there will never be one Theory of Everything to unify all of human knowledge in an equation that fits on a t-shirt. Multiplicity is how the cosmos knows itself, because all models of the world — whether they take the form of intellectual theories or organisms in an ongoing dance of adaptation with their environment — are partial, incomplete, and provisional. Every statement of truth is a conjecture based on limited information, conditioned by a specific history, and ultimately up for revision. Even the myriad standards by which we settle on satisfactory explanations are in tension and conflict with each other — and that's a good thing, because unanimous agreement results in brittle, easily disrupted strategies. If humankind stands any chance of navigating the immensely complex challenges we face, it's time for us to jettison the notion that there's One Idea To Rule Them All, and fan out into "The Adjacent Possible," covering as much ground as we can to search the space of what could be more comprehensively.

✨ AI Art Experiments Stash

Lately I've kind of lost myself in the rapture of exploring text-to-image AI art prompts on the invite-only platform Midjourney, which is (at least in some respects) considerably more advanced than similar apps like NightCafé and Wombo Dream.

Part of this is my lifelong commitment to guinea-pigging myself with new creative tools, starting with my immersion into Google Glass and the resultant contemplation on the co-evolution of surveillance technologies and the self (see essay parts 1, 2, 3, 4). Exploring AI-assisted mass production of works that would, just two years ago, have each taken 20-50 hours to paint...well, I'm hardly the only artist that feels drawn into this as a necessary precursor to navigating the disruption of the creative sector by these tools.

In the meantime, I want to give patrons exclusive access to my curated "dream stream" of Midjourney experiments — feel free to download any of these images you like for personal use: wallpapers, desktops, one-off pillow/t-shirt printing, whatever floats your boat.

Here are some of the most exciting images to have emerged from AI "latent space" lately:

✨ Podcasts on AI, Art, and Philosophy

The above experiments have led to a whole series of fantastic conversations on the direction things are moving, how it connects to ancient esoteric practices, the labor market implications, and how I'm engaging with the mysterious Other through these tools.  Here are three solid recordings on this and related topics:

But of course it also raises deep philosophical issues, like those I recently discussed on The Jim Rutt Show with Jim and my friend and frequent Future Fossils guest J.F. Martel — questions of what art even is, whether sentience is required, what if anything is uniquely human, and how different art might be in another few years' time. I recommend digging into that discussion — and staying tuned for more, because this is a conversation I consider very squarely in the Future Fossils wheel house, and more urgent than most people seem to realize.

One conversation wasn't enough so I ALSO just appeared on my friend Michael Phillip's show Third Eye Drops to talk about Google engineer Blake Lemoine's claims of AI sentience and machine ensoulment, labor market disruptions from new creative tools like Midjourney, and what it's like to "breed" images straight out of the ethers of the imagination.

From Shane's show notes: "In this episode, I catch up with my good friend, Michael Garfield. Michael is the host of the Future Fossils podcast and the Complexity podcast. In his 4th appearance on Here We Are, we discuss topics like fatherhood, lifestyle changes, and the ever-changing world we live in."

✨ Recommended Resources on Human-Technology Egregores

I recently got into a very deep and intense conversation with Carnegie Mellon/SFI Professor Simon DeDeo during his latest visit to the Santa Fe Institute campus. (Check out his talk and my Twitter coverage of it, which I found equal parts nightmarish and utterly inspiring.)

Most of that two hours was spent in roundtable discussion with him and our 2022 cohort of Undergraduate Complexity Researchers, making for the most exciting opportunity I've ever had at work to blow the minds of a bunch of awesome, brilliant twenty-somethings.

Here is the epic mind-dump I sent them afterward, collecting resources that came to mind during our rap session. If you've been following the show for a while you've probably heard me bring most of these up at one point or another, but I'm happy to share them all in one place.

I apologize in advance for what my buddy Mitch Mignano would call an "ecodelic avalanche." Enjoy either spending the rest of time getting around to this or immediately binning it all to preserve your mental health!

(Album cover is from my ongoing series of AI art experiments with Midjourney, which as mentioned above I'm archiving for the personal use of my patrons.)

✨ New Future Fossils Podcast Episodes

Listen/Subscribe here.

Listen/Subscribe here.

✨ New Music: Live at the West China Tea House (Austin, Texas 2022.05.28)

Member-exclusive HD download on Patreon or Bandcamp.

On the musical front, here's an intimate "storyteller" format acoustic and electroacoustic concert spanning fourteen years of songwriting, with some teahouse-specific improvisations to accompany gong fu tea ceremony. This was my first show in Austin, Texas in nearly four years, a very emotionally intense reunion with old friends and the land I love and once called home. Big thanks to So Han Fan and Nate Bell at the West China Tea House for making space for me to play a family-friendly concert (you can hear my kids screaming throughout) and for the live Future Fossils Podcast I taped there in between sets with Kevin Welch and David Hensley of EFF-Austin!

(If you want a blast from the past (or into the future?), I played one of my favorite late-night instrumental sets at their pop-up tea house at Utopia Festival back in 2017, when they were still called the Guan Yin Tea House.)

Lastly, for now, here's a link to my ever-growing Spotify playlist of new music discoveries and old favorites. I've been keeping and cultivating this for three years now, and it's EXTENSIVE, over 37 hours long. Enjoy!:

The Future is Noisy • New A.I. Music Videos • In Defense of Picard • Future Fossils with EFF-Austin • A Manifesto for Weird Science • Diverse Aliens

"Two dangers threaten the universe: order and disorder."

— Paul Valéry

"Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can evolve."

— Oscar Wilde

The next newsletter will be an explosion of new visual art experiments in several different media. THIS one is a combination of speculative non-fiction; experimental art-plus-electroacoustic-music collaborations with A.I.; two of the spiciest podcast episodes I've ever released; and a short slide deck summarizing my critiques about the current state of astrobiology. 

It's all about as heady as can be. If you just want eye candy, hold tight; I have plenty in store for you.

📝 New Writing

Read "The Future is Noisy"

My latest essay for How To Live in The Future is now at Return.Life. Here's a teaser:

When I imagine forward into futures, all of them but the worst are noisy places: highly interactive, densely woven, layered, and syntactical – and as in any web of chatter, lots of lossy transfers, errors, and the patterns of intelligences too bizarre or fast or vast for anyone to notice are registered as noise. Stand back far enough and it’s hard to ignore the curve: from the biofilms that dominated early Earth and made no more noise than gaseous bubbling, to the launch of rockets and atomic bombs. We’ve found a way to make ourselves heard...

Read "In Defense of Star Trek: Picard & Discovery"

Here is my response to disparaging comments made by several of my friends about how Starfleet and The Federation of Planets no longer represent what they did in Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation, I felt it necessary to say a few words in defense of the narrative turns taken by the recent series Picard and Discovery on Paramount+.

This one is considerably less deep and interesting than the piece above, frankly, but it might have more resonance for some people given that Star Trek is such an extensive cultural phenomenon.

🎸 New Music + Animated A.I. Imagery

Watch & Listen to Love Machines Vol. I

I’ve devoted the last 17 years to exploring the constructed and metamorphic boundaries of human-machine, self-other, nature-culture, created-discovered…all of which are under interrogation in our acceleratingly weird era of digital media and proliferating intelligence.

As a musician, this manifests in site-specific “cyberacoustic guitar” improvisations that embed artist and instrument into what Darwin might have called a “tangled bank” of electronic augmentations — sampling, mangling, remixing, and reinventing acoustic music as a raw material just like the complex transformations of gene and meme transfer drive the evolutionary process as more conventionally understood.

As a visual artist, I’ve recently taken to exploring the same ever-folding symbiosis from the other shore: starting with text-to-image AI artworks in collaboration with generative adversarial networks, then animating them by hand and setting them to music.

Both paths recruit non-human agency and the contingency of machinic creativity into my own dreamy psychedelic wanderings through transmedia hyperspace — building and testing, in the words of rhetorician Richard Doyle, ecodelic “training wheels for transhumanism” that perform, and prepare audiences for, the convoluted subjectivity of the futures into which we will be reborn. The Love Machines series explores the intersection of intentionality and randomness, chaos and order, will and automation, heart and mind arising in the clear light of awareness…

🎧 New Podcasts

Listen to Future Fossils Episode 187

Listen to Future Fossils Episode 186

And speaking of weird science...

👾 "Diverse Aliens" Slide Deck

Here are the seven slides I contributed to a group presentation for the 2021 Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, interrogating the criteria used by SETI (The Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) and beckoning people deeper into a somewhat more rigorous embrace of Mystery:

View/Download Here

That's all for now. (It's still a lot!) Thank you for sitting with me and be well!

New Blotter Art, Solo Acoustic EP, Futurism Essay, Sensemaking Roundtable, Upcoming Book Club

“We can only navigate outside as well as we can navigate within.”

– Timothy Leary

I'm not really clear on how I've managed to get so much done with all the parenting and day job, lately, but regardless I'm pleased to share these latest highlights with you!  Enjoy and feel free to write back if the spirit moves you.  (And of course, if you like this stuff I hope you'll share the newsletter with a friend; not touring festivals anymore means I get almost zero chances to build out this list the way I would prefer to, one inspiring in-person conversation at a time...)

🎨 New Art: "Liquid Sunrise" Blotter Art (Signed/Numbered)

Grab Yours Here

The Shakedown Gallery in San Francisco is the world's premier source for blotter art, and I'm honored to finally get some artwork into their collection! Grab your own (perfectly innocuous and legal) prints of my piece "Liquid Sunrise" — released in a signed and numbered series of 100 as part of their special Bicycle Day 2022 drop, including works by my friend and hero Randal Roberts and many other greats — for a better price than pretty much any other print deal I've ever offered. Much like the peak experience they depict, they won't last...but at least you'll never have a bummer "oh man, human AGAIN?" come down.

🎸 New Solo Acoustic EP: Empty Frames

Download WAV/MP3 at Bandcamp or Patreon

These are placeholders to stake and commit to record songs I love that aren't ready for prime time yet. A song ought to stand on its own and I hope these do, but this is basically me sharing my songbook with a feather in it for a bookmark. They mean a lot to me but I haven't found the time to give them a proper studio treatment yet. We have:

1. Ian - about my baby son, with maybe some Elliott Smith and (sleepy) Tenacious D and Lana Del Rey swimming around in there.

2. A Merry Mess - not sure exactly but a tip of the hat to Jeff Buckley and my friend Mitch Mignano.

3. The 120th Shrine - regarding The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, kind of a cowboy ballad since you're riding a horse a lot, but also gliding.

4. Seeing Like A State - with a nod to James C. Scott's book, about mathematically guaranteed injustice and the tragedy of being one of the ants out of a plane window.

5. Buried Together - for Nikki Taylor, with whom I intend to be interred, God Willing.

6. Frog Seven Green - a vignette of life in a hot tub under shade sails on the porch of a basement apartment nestled up close to the mountains in Santa Fe with a young family.
credits

📝 New Writing: The Future Is Noisy

A nearly-completed draft of my first new chapter of How To Live in The Future since 2018 (!) is now available to Patreon supporters, and is in edit now to be published (in what I'm sure will be a very different-looking for) at Return.Life soon. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:

Noise is here to stay because making noise on purpose can jolt a system out of its rut. The fool in the king’s court or the heyoka at Sun Dance both keep the social system from settling into maladaptive complacency. When mass extinctions disrupt the byzantine symbiotic networks of mature ecosystems, fine-tuned specialists take the hit and loose, messy generalists that can catch as catch can — the raccoons, cockroaches, Lystrosaurs — misfit organisms that seemed forever out of place suddenly come into their own and help reboot the entire food web. It pays for the biosphere to keep these clowns around.

Then there’s Michelle Girvan, who explains that literally just the live feed of a camera trained on sloshing water in a bucket is enough to double the predictive horizon of a machine learning algorithm trained to model weather…seeing further by leaning less on memory. Similarly, Erik Hoel hypothesizes that dreams function to prevent “overfitting” of the brain to its conditioning, allowing it to generalize from past experiences to novel future scenarios. It would fit, then, that not only jazz and noise music but the myriad other dreamlike expressions of modern art — from surrealism to cubism to combinatorial music — all emerged at a time when we started to “lose the plot,” or perhaps more accurately realize that the story the modern world had been telling itself was nothing more than a linear projection drawn poorly from heavily biased historical sampling.

In times when you can’t trust the score civilization has been following, it’s a more sensible recourse to stop following the conductor and play by ear. Cognitive scientist Tyler Marghetis, in studying the quantitative data tracking critical transitions among improvisational jazz ensembles, notes moments when the entire group breaks through and shifts together all at once, like a pirouetting murmuration of starlings; the pace and immediacy of this kind of response is impossible for those who insist on an objective “view from nowhere” – a monolithic canonical version of reality – and refuse to accept that, in Thompson’s words, “A fact requires a theory just as a flame requires an atmosphere.” In other words, people who refuse to relax their focus, let figure dissolve into ground, enter a flow state that can respond faster than the clunky executive processing of the frontal lobe, and dream with the agility of a disinhibited mind in attunement. Education at the edge of history can’t rely on the authority of educators brought up in a world that no longer exists; a postapocalyptic pedagogy for digital natives discards rote memorization and writes curricula that emphasize curiosity, lifelong learning, collective intelligence, and the power of search.

Become a patron if you want to soak up my illuminated mystic science rantings right away...

🎧 New Future Fossils Podcast Episode 185

Dig In Here

Be forewarned: This latest episode is some extremely heady stuff. But thankfully, it's also full of heart and soul...

Back in February, Jonathan Rowson posted two clips (here and here) from his latest in-progress writing tlimito Twitter, where it succeeded in baiting a bunch of the folks with whom I regularly interact as members of the so-called "Liminal Web" into reflecting on the value of partitioning a global boil of loosely-associated "sensemakers," "meta-theorists," and "systems poets" into well-meaning but ultimately dubious cultural taxonomies.

I had plenty to say about this (here, here, and here) from my awkwardly consistent stance of being both enthusiastic and skeptical about apparently everything. But so did numerous other brilliant and inspiring people, including Bonnitta Roy, Stephanie Lepp, Ashley Colby, and Jason Snyder – all of whom I've wanted on the show for a while (with the exception of Stephanie, with whom I had a great chat back on episode 154). So I took it upon myself to press for an on-the-record group discussion about the virtue and folly of putting labels on sociocultural processes and networks that are defined by their liminality: Is this ultimately a good thing, or does it just kill the magic in a foolish servility to economic pressures and the desire to be recognized as A Movement?

When we finally met at the end of March for our call, the conversation turned to issues with more urgency and gravitas — namely: Is it even helpful to spend all of our time talking about crises and metacrises when there is so much work to be done?

What transpired was easily one of the more profound and inspired conversations I've ever had the good fortune to host on this show, although it was also more beset with insane and infuriating technical problems that getting it ready for release took over thirty hours of excruciating editing. I am so immensely glad I am finally done and can get on with my damn life! But also that I get to share this with you and hear what the rest of our scene(s) have to contribute to this discourse.

📚 Next Book Club: When We Cease To Understand The World

Call Details On Patreon

The Future Fossils Media Club returns next month on May 14th at 1:00 - 2:30 pm Mountain (12 noon Pacific, 3 pm Eastern) with a discussion of Benjamin Labatut's award-winning When We Cease To Understand The World, a visionary exploration of "the complex ties between scientific and mathematical understanding and personal and historical catastrophe...a book that fuses fact and fiction to revelatory and profoundly disconcerting effect."

You can grab your copy at the Future Fossils Bookshop.org Reading List — and whether or not you can make this call, I recommend going there to check out an extensive (although not comprehensive YET) list of recommendations we've discussed on the show. (I love Bookshop.org because it's a small but still nontrivial diversion of excess funds away from Amazon and toward local booksellers...and I get a tiny piece of every sale at no additional cost to you-the-buyer.)

"I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.”

– Blaise Pascal