This week I have one of the most vulnerable, personal, and profound conversations ever shared on the show — and it’s one that speaks directly to the deepest and most persistent themes addressed on Future Fossils. Android Jones is one of the world’s pre-eminent digital painters and an utterly singular and inimitable visionary artist. He’s also a loving husband and father of three, an old friend (even if we don’t talk as often as I’d like, or as perhaps we should), and someone I regard as a torch-bearer along the paths of both professional uncompromising creativity and openly psychedelic parenting. And now he leads the way in helping me and his planet-wide fanbase learn how to process grief and rise from the ashes of loss like a badass phoenix…

A few weeks ago, the barn he inherited from his father — in which he kept all of his creative technology and projects — burned to the ground. Here is the intense and vulnerable two-hour conversation we had about his loss and the spiritual transformations he has undergone since. For the first time ever, Android gives a play-by-play recounting of what happened that fateful morning and how he has grown in the aftermath of losing his “dragon horde” of technology, art, and personal records. And we explore the science and philosophy and esoteric interpretation of what it means to grow beyond the envelope of the human organism into our “extended phenotypes” of technological augmentation — and then to lose it all in a single incandescent moment, laid bare by an Act of God to face the world with sudden and intense rawness.

This is a powerful, one, folks. I’m honored to share it with you…

(Big thanks to Lucid News for inspiring me to do this. You can find a very, very tightly-edited transcript of this discussion on their website.)

Editor’s Note: I mention a passage from William Irwin Thompson’s The American Replacement in Nature in which I misquote him as speaking on “prophets and pastoralists” when in fact he wrote about “mystics and moralists.” You can hear the correct quote in this track from my 2016 Boom Festival performance, which plays at the end of this episode:

"The moralist tends to think the laws of God are more on his side than on his enemy's, so he will try through faith and religion and the exercise of ritual to get God to settle down with him and go along with his way of life. The mystic, however, is not a moralist, for motion, complexity, and an angelic-demonic ambiguity in which one's enemy is also a part of a divine manifestation in history are all part of a cosmic life on the other side of the fence. Home means a lot to moralists, but the mystic is society's alien and is not allowed to have a home smaller than the universe. Any time he tries to settle for less, to settle down and set up fences, God appears as the moving whirlwind."- William Irwin Thompson

✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon Buy my original paintings or commission new work Buy my music on Bandcamp (they take 15%)This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group. Join us!I'm also ISO moderators interested in helping steward the Discord server so I can release it into the wilds as a fan-operated platform. Want to claim stake?

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✨ Mentioned & Related Links:Future Fossils Episode 111 - Android Jones on Analog/Digital, Painting the Sutras, & Being an Artist Dad Complexity Episode 90 - Caleb Scharf on The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome Complexity Episode 35 - Scaling Laws & Social Networks in The Time of COVID-19 with Geoffrey West (Part 1)Ben Ridgway A Manifesto For Live Painting by Michael Garfield Death of a Salesman Trezor Cryptocurrency Wallets John Perry BarlowTheme Music: “Olympus Mons” off the Martian Arts EP by Michael Garfield

✨ A Special One-Off Sneak Peek at A New Offering for Subscribers:I recently promised members of my Patreon/Substack members-only Facebook group, where I ordinarily share on the order of ten cool external links a day, that I’d be moving my Web curation into a special newsletter supplement for paid subscribers. Here is a public-facing glimpse at yet one more thing you can expect in return for supporting the intense love’s labor that goes into the show and my other creative work:

Recommended Music:Vertigo Gambler — Juvenile Drama (lush folk-electronic pop co-written and mixed/mastered by fellow Santa Fean Toni Dear)David Forlano — Shiver Like Dust (iPad electronic ambient improvisations)Starling Arrow — Cradle (gorgeous all-star group of female singer-songwriters writing and recording together)fy00g — Mummy Fart! (my old friend and collaborator William Allan Ross’ latest trippy glitchy bass single)Master Margherita — The Sound of Science (new dubbreak 436Hz mix by Moreno, former curator and stage manager of Boom’s Chillout Gardens)

Recommended Video:View From The Other Side (Drew Brophy on NDEs, shared by Charles Eisenstein)How to Watch Hundreds of Free Movies on YouTube (via OpenCulture)Cause and Constraints (Alicia Juarrero at The Complexity Lounge)Residuality Theory: Philosophy and Practice (Barry O’Reilly at The Complexity Lounge)

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

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