✨ New Art, Music, Writing: The Frothy Edge Returns to Substack

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

I recently made the decision to migrate this blog back to Substack from Revue — which algorithmically unsubscribed over 1,000 of my readers for reasons they couldn’t explain, and delivered 20% the open rates that Substack did for the same newsletter I’ve been publishing since 2009. I have to host this work somewhere that will treat authors and audiences with more respect, so here we are again.

If you want to read this on my website, here it is, along with the complete archives.

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is my response to disparaging comments made by several of my friends about how Starfleet and The Federation of Planets no longer represent what they did in Star Trek: The Original Series and The Next Generation, I felt it necessary to say a few words in defense of the narrative turns taken by the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