Michael Garfield's blog

The "collage-umentary" film Internet Rising attempts to answer the question, "What is the internet?," from the perspective of technogurus (Kevin Kelly), e-celebrities (ze frank), media scholars (Douglas Rushkoff) and Second Life activists (Serenity96).[Video]

Amsterdam-based artist Dadara is celebrating this year of radical change with the latest project from his boundary-smashing Exchangibition Bank:  a "2012" note that further blurs the distinction between fine art and finance, banking and theatric ritual.

Last month's discovery at CERN of neutrinos traveling faster than light has physics forums buzzing about the possibility that this is “solid” evidence of long-hypothesized additional dimensions.  And we seem to be on the verge of confronting this new reality, this encounter with the transcendent unknown, on a mass cultural level. 

An international network of visionary musicians aim to pay ongoing medical costs for the legendary author of PIKHAL and TIKHAL with the double-disc opus L.A.B. Tracks: A Benefit Album for Sasha Shulgin.

In collaboration with MAPS and Reality Sandwich, I'm putting together a benefit compilation to help Sasha Shulgin's family pay for medical costs incurred after his recent stroke.

The more I look, the more I find a growing body of evidence that time – both as it is experienced and as it is disclosed by science – is best understood as more of a loom than a river. Gathered here are a few programs that suggest that our ideas of cause and effect need to be drastically reworked.

In two videos from the Evolver.net-sponsored Light & Shadow Tour, Michael Garfield tells stories of the shadow's role in personal and cultural transformation. [Video]

This year at Burning Man's Entheon Village, I gave a talk on how evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, philosophy, architecture, and art challenge our constructed categories of "individual" and "collective," pointing us toward a new understanding of the self as a multitude and our communities as living, sentient beings.

It was a lucky set of circumstances that brought me to Sera Phi in San Francisco to engage the local crew in this far-roaming discussion on the topic of dreaming.

Visionaries like Tim Leary and Terence McKenna remind us of the stubborn persistence of the unconscious, the body, and the other.  In their own words, presented as a “virtual conversation,” here are the core messages of a transhumanist vision informed by the psychedelic experience.

When I am in the mood for some armchair futurism, I like to remember the old Chinese adage: “Let a hundred flowers bloom.” Why do we think it will be one way or the other? The future arrives by many roads.  Courtesy of some of science fiction’s finest speculative minds, here are a few of my favorites. 

At this year's Burning Man, four evolutionary biologists came together to discuss the deeper issues of evolution.

NASA has publicly decried Roland Emmerich's 2012 disaster movie as misinformation, claiming it "exploits people's fears."

It wasn’t until the nineties that anyone suggested biology could be better understood by looking at it through the lens of quantum theory. Now, a new kind of science, called “quantum biology,” is beginning to emerge -- and it could change everything we know, again.

Ever listened to Beethoven's Fifth from the center of a slowly tumbling dodecahedron?  AstoundSound's holophonic software can take you there.

Playing around on the edges is inherently dangerous. In any form, creativity challenges preconceptions, digests conventions, and throws us to burn and drown in the intensely unfamiliar. It changes who we are. "Being creative" is agreeing to an adventure from which nobody has ever, ever returned.

Wandering the streets of Burning Man this summer, my contemplation of sacred geography and comparative mythology lead me to explore the relationship between the outer and inner worlds, death and rebirth, synchronicity, symbolism, and ritual.

Could a federally-funded endangered species derivatives market be the next step in conservation?

In this phone conversation with author Laura Faeth, we discuss the hidden dimensions of pop music and try to "light a fire under some rockstars' asses," pushing them to embrace their love-beaming, shamanistic super-creativity.

The way we listen to music today is not going to last. A bevy of new technologies is set to radically change our relationship to auditory media.

Consider polyamory side by side with copyright law. They are both symptoms of a deep struggle that we as individuals and as a society are having with the concept of ownership.

Explore humanity’s unfolding understanding of the relationship between physical waves and states of consciousness.