“I think we’re at a real crossroads. I’m an old guy, I may not live to see a whole lot more of the changes that are undoubtedly going to happen, but I would sure like to. I try to be an optimist. I’d like to hope that through education and science and clear thinking and good communication we come to sort of a passive understanding of the stuff we need to do – rather than having any ‘conspiracy’ organizations shoving it down everybody’s throats. We can have creativity and BETTER lives, rather than just more and more and more.”   This week our guest is visionary artist Mark Henson, whose highly detailed and frequently erotic landscape paintings portray the full spectrum of human experience, our greatest dreams and most disturbing nightmares.   Mark’s been a friend and elder to me since we met in 2010 and I was delighted to catch up with him at this year’s Psychedelic Science Conference in Oakland – please excuse the background noise in this recording as you enjoy this festive and far-ranging conversation about art, life, and creativity!   TOPICS: - Viewing and making art as time travel. - Will artificial intelligence replace artists? - Can we understand the universe? - Altered sense of time self in dreams and psychedelic experiences. - How technology has crept into our memory and dream lives. - The necessity of Universal Basic Income AND Life Purpose in an automated post-work world. - “The Work” of ayahuasca users and telepathic post-humans (on social media) of being open to the intensity and burden of collective experience. - The importance of an intentional media diet. - How Mark got to collaborate with Jimi Hendrix as a teenager! - Mark’s thoughts on the history and evolving intersection of Street Art, Fine Art, and Live Music. - How different musical styles and intoxicants contribute to different media ecosystems. - How Mark and his stepson almost got one of his paintings into the White House. - Projected art as graffiti and political action; augmented reality graffiti as the future of dissent, and geospatial metadata as a new cyberpunk Wild West – metagraffiti. - Defacing ads and reclaiming public space, a polite How To. - The future of the family. “My overall project here is to create impressions of what life was like, in these days…”   “By 2000, we were supposed to be flying around in little personal cars and live in a peaceful world where the big issues had been resolved. That didn’t happen, so I’m not going to hold my breath on a Singularity.”   “Sometimes I have fairly vivid dreams where, if the dream is strong enough, later on when I’m awake I might confuse that reality with something that happened in my waking moments. Did I dream that, or did that really h ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhs2WudpujE

This week we talk to artist, musician, and community organizer Violet Luxton, who works and lives at the intersection of Indigenous wisdom traditions and Indigenous rights movements, #LandBack and #BlackLivesMatter, afro-futurism, yoga, and visionary biotechnological speculation. In a conversation far shorter than the subject matter deserves, we explore some of the themes in and related to her profound academic paper, "Transtemporality and The Technology of Indigenous Kinship: The Science of Remembering Ourselves." If you believe in the value of this show and want to see it thrive, support Future Fossils on Patreon and/or please rate and review Future Fossils on Apple Podcasts! Patrons gain access to over twenty secret episodes, unreleased music, our monthly book club, and many other wondrous things. Music by Future Fossils co-host Evan “Skytree” Snyder. Enjoy, and thanks for listening! _,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_ Also Discussed In This Episode: Violet Luxton at LinkedInSaki Mafundikwa — Ingenuity and Elegance in Ancient African Alphabets [video]Ron Eglash — The Fractals at The Heart of African Designs [video] _,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,__,.-'~'-.,_ Additional Resources: Buy the books we mention on Future Fossils at Bookshop.org/shop/FutureFossils, which supports local bookstores instead of Amazon and pays me 10% at no additional cost to you. When you’re ready to switch it up, here are my music and listening recommendations on Spotify. I transcribe this show with help from Podscribe.ai — which I highly recommend to other podcasters. If you’d like to help me edit transcripts for my upcoming Future Fossils book project, please let me know! I’m @michaelgarfield on Twitter & Instagram. If you’re looking for new ways to help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, let me recommend the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and appreciate it so much I decided to join their affiliate program. The science is solid. And for my fellow guitarists in the audience, let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I’ve ever played. I just grabbed one this year and LOVE it. Videos soon! • Venmo: @futurefossils• PayPal.me/michaelgarfield• Patreon: patreon.com//michaelgarfield• BTC: 1At2LQbkQmgDugkchkP6QkDJCvJ5rv3Jm• ETH: 0x058aCaf2dd4DB222d89D65fdDF3f0500c5622448i ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmna2X5JnsY

Follow my adventures: http://michaelgarfield.blogspot.com Buy a print of this painting: http://michaelgarfieldart.com Stream/Download the entire album: http://bit.ly/21stCenturyRomance Voiceover: I encourage those of you who think you are here just to enjoy yourselves to find a small way to beautify this place, to participate, because you're given the opportunity to do so. This is really not a "producer/consumer" kind of, "beer-and-sponsors" kind of thing...no offense to the beer people, wherever they are. But! You're going to get sick of hearing me say this, but we live in a time when it's no longer sufficient just to sit back and watch history unfold before us. We're no longer merely discovering that we're able to put our hand in the global solution, here, but that it is required of us. This Spaceship Earth requires all of us on the oars, as it were, if it's going to go anywhere but over the waterfall. So in spite of the fact that I'm up here, for now, and you're over there, for now, I encourage you find me later and have a conversation. Tell me what you know, and what motivates you, and what you're passionate about, and what you're good at. I love hearing those things. I love helping people empower themselves to make a positive difference in their communities. So hopefully, hopefully we all get a little something out of this festival, because I know that the people that are putting it on really, really want us all to go home with something new that we can bring to our families and our friends and make a substantial change, however small, in the rest of the world, in the other fifty-one weeks a year. Keep that in mind, I guess, if I can be so bold as to ask you to do so... ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9lwr-I2tBI

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 Charles Darwin would have called “the 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 are ways of recruiting 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 are destined to 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… ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0wp5bQbEZA