art by benjamin harubin. text and art copyright benjamin harubin. posted in no particular order, from 1976 to the present. i have the capability to print the strictly digital works up to 40" with archival materials. some restrictions may apply.
contact email is bharubin provided by gmail with a com thrown in there for good measure. and a @, too.

click on pics to giganticize. dimensions are listed in order: horizontal, vertical, depth.











Wednesday, December 31, 2014

Cycle Up Re-Revolution (Re: Evolution)




"Cycle Up Re-Revolution (Re: Evolution)"
benjamin harubin 2014
10" x 6" x 1"
found object assemblage


This year will not be the same as any other year.
This year will not even be the same length as an ordinary year.
This year the earth revolution will be telepresented in 4D breathing color.
This year the cycle will turn in a new plane,
higher in frequency,
higher in urgency,
higher in Highness.
This year the King will come;
the Kingdom come,
without a condom,
without a care
for the counting of
all manner of new hybrid beings,
new memes
and new designs.
This year will turn over twice.
And what you thought was a solid Arrow of Time
has now a new dimension.
Hope ya'll got your sunglasses on
(so you can see what you ain't looking at).






stay tuned for morhe green spaces









Sunday, August 31, 2014

Creatures Made in God's Infancy from 20th Century Artifacts Retrieved Via Time Machine Invented in the 33rd Century #44: The Myoote



"Creatures Made in God's Infancy from 20th Century Artifacts Retrieved Via Time Machine Invented in the 33rd Century #44:  The Myoote"
assemblage
6" x 4"
benjamin harubin 2013
(in a private collection)




The Myoote is pronounced like "mute", although you can hear the selectrical energies and the dread babbling aftermath.   

(if you had a machine that could read people's thoughts, and you played it back to them, they might go mad, or more likely, insist that the machine is malfunctioning, picking up someone else's thoughts, or random computer generated nonsense.)

the size listed does not include the tail, which is longer than the observable universe is wide.*




*unconfirmed but probable, contingent upon method of measurement.   certainly information content, barring compression and converted to atomic length units, would exceed the OU. 








MEGA INSECTOID TRANS-HUMANOID




"Mega Insectoid Trans-Humanoid"
magazine collage and acrylic paint
8" x 10.5"
benjamin harubin 2011





in a horrifying nightmare/ecstatic drug trip,
i felt my face to be inside out.

the long branching tendrils of my existence trailing through time
the pulsing messy pipes, tangled neurons, rubbery blood hoses,
the grubby hands sweating, multi-armed monstrosity,
gravity gluing me down, down,
down through the earth,
to the bloody egg oil mineral muck

the sound of thousand millions of machines
the roar of crushing atmospheres
a billion times the mass of the sun
a sound so great no organ can image it...

it's ok. it's ok now. just a day like any other.
boring.
exhilarating.
just a flashing flashing back to the day before birth.
























Monday, July 14, 2014

IT IS WHAT...

"IT IS WHAT..."
acrylic, enamel and collage on wood
24" diameter
benjamin harubin 2014


A VIEW INSIDE THE SIGHT

or

Is the perception of a conscious "I" an illusion hopelessly trapped in the (millisecond) past?

or 

The EyeSection Seconds...

or

maybe i'll let David M. Eagleman grab the mike:


from the article BRAIN TIME:  (via Edge)

"But there is a deeper challenge the brain must tackle, without which feature-binding would rarely be possible. This is the problem of temporalbinding: the assignment of the correct timing of events in the world. The challenge is that different stimulus features move through different processing streams and are processed at different speeds. The brain must account for speed disparities between and within its various sensory channels if it is to determine the timing relationships of features in the world."

and:

"We have recently discovered that a deficit in temporal order judgments may underlie some of the hallmark symptoms of schizophrenia, such as misattributions of credit ("My hand moved, but I didn't move it") and auditory hallucinations, which may be an order reversal of the generation and hearing of normal internal monolog."



The point being that all these kinds of processing must occur with various numbers of interneuronal steps. each in its own time. surely this must present a problem- a disorderly sea of ticking clocks. how is the sensation of a unified sense of self embedded in a unitary "now" achieved?









Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Map of BowLand: A ROSE IS A ROSE IS NOT A ROSE IS A ROSE IS A GLASS ONION


Map of BowLand
28" X 31" X 9"
acrylic and paint marker on inkjet canvas print 
on custom plaster support
with 3.5" floppy, dispenser cap, pipe cleaner, steel globe, 
bamboo, analog playback parts and canvas
benjamin harubin 2014






People look at a rose and think
"a rose, how pretty i think i'll paint that"

And then there are those that look at the rose
as an interaction of visible photons with a surface,
a complex cloud of many frequencies,
refracted by a lens
and projected upside down in a bowl of living neurons.

There's also the act of painting that rose on a canvas:
the muscular movement abstracted,
a complex geometry of shapes and curves,
and of literally (literarily?) painting that rose (red).

And then others can consider the botanical function of a rose,
as a sex organ
(pimpin' bees,  making the money honey),
part of a tangled bank
of mutually dependent interconnections,
as part of a mating ritual of humans, (a nuptial gift).

And then, there's all of the myriad historical and personal associations,
(higher order cerebral cortex clusters).

And then there's those who see the rose
as a metaphor-
for the dualistic nature of afferent neurons
(pleasure and pain, baby bitch).

And if you had enough electrodes inserted into individual neurons
throughout the living brain of a subject shown a rose,
then the idea that you can know a rose by any name is seen to be silly.
Better at least maybe could say a number of qubits,
that in superposition,
also represents a portrait of Abraham Lincoln,
a classic Singer 66
and protein information ports floating in a cell membrane
simultaneously and shit on an operating table.

with floaters.






the title is in part a part of a series of perfectly good Picasso quotes, trashed.







here you can see the arc of the canvas
(click for bigness):
















Friday, June 13, 2014

Les Demonzoids de Avondale

Les Demonzoids de Avondale
acrylic and ink on paper on wood
23.5" X 24"
benjamin harubin 2014


Each figure is depicted in a disconcerting confrontational manner and none are conventionally human. The beings appear as slightly menacing and rendered with angular and distorted body shapes. One is shown with an African mask-like face and three more with faces in the Infantile style of Harubin's native Long Island, giving them a savage aura. In this adaptation of Surrealism and abandonment of perspective in favor of a flat, two-dimensional picture plane, Harubin makes a radical departure from traditional Modern painting. The Post Apocalyptic work is widely considered to be seminal in the early development of both the New Synthesis and Post- Post Apocalyptic art. Demonzoids was revolutionary and controversial, and led to wide anger and disagreement, even amongst his closest associates and friends...










(...great artists steal copy).
















Tuesday, June 3, 2014

Prototype for a Neurochemical Re-Architecturality



Prototype for a Neurochemical Re-Architecturality
acrylic, pencil and collage on wood construction
37" x 34" x 7"
benjamin harubin 1991

on loan from the Miller Foundation



it is not my intention to engage in obscurantism for its own sake.  

on the other hand, if it were possible for creators of music, poetry, painting and other less than "rational" art forms to express themselves explicitly in terms that make sense to the linear, verbal mind, they would do so, and save themselves shitloads of trouble.  

on the third hand (the blue one), i don't think that exegesis is actually harmful to a work of art, so i may briefly engage in some, with the proviso that you understand that it is less than foam upon the waves.  
everything is in context anyway.

and painting does not exist outside of an architectural context, whether it be a naturally occurring cave wall, a museum, a living room or the architecture of transistors in a computer.  
on another level, art does not exist as some kind of "statement" aside from the architecture of social and biological interactions and its function therein. 

this piece can therefore be seen as a kind of microcosm; a model of chaotic interactions, reminiscent of random thoughts.  
for me, it is less about a specific gestalt of meaning than about this process of finding and creating meaning in a neural architecture.

hello Marshall McLuhan (welcome to Modern Art* 101).

whereas Modernism is sometimes seen as destructive and reductionist, there is another coexisting pillar which is an unbridled celebration of endless new possibility.  
for increased possibilities to exist requires a continuing understanding of the processes and context of being human.  


this is the task of the post- post-modern, post-apocalyptic Reintegration.


so here we have a disorienting jumble of windows rotating fiercely about the axis of attention.  
ideally, the borders and connections of this work would keep extending like a demented altar piece until it is housed inside of its own post-apocalyptic temple complex and inextricably and electronically woven into world.  

this piece was constructed of several separate planes, so i am including some three quarter shots and a detail.  click to sizematize.













*as explained before, we can still talk about an ongoing Modernism, even after its official closing rite because tendrils of inheritance.






  

Monday, May 19, 2014

EXTANT POSSIBILITY

"Extant Possibility"
subtitled: "intentional misuse of this dimensional portal...?"
acrylic on fabric + stretcher
30" x 18"
benjamin harubin 2007



UPDATE: sharper picture! (thanks, Joe)


sometimes i can't resist providing the exegesis, but true art lovers can skip the following:

The possibility that is extant, despite the contradiction, is the functioning of the human mind. 
Art is the transportation of the dreamer (the viewer) to another dimension.
It does this through the use of the Magic Window or dimensional portal, aka the Proscenium. 
If you object to the notion that this painting could be seen as some kind of device that could literally transport you to another dimension 
(probably some Lovecraftian eldritch dimension where the laws of physics are different than ours and strange biomorphic creatures spew fluids) 
then i challenge you to present the schematics of what consciousness is exactly and how it does its magic trick.  
Modernism, in the effort to explain everything materially, has declaimed Meaning as shadow and cheap tricks (reflected in the humble approach to materials in this piece).  
Instead it has focused on the material presentation (the naked thing itself). [even though Modernism in art officially ended sometime in the decade after WWII, we are still living its legacy]
Yet meaning persists.  
But i prefer to use the term "function" as opposed to "meaning":  
Even the most abstract presentation in art cannot escape meaning- in the way that it functions in society and in the human mind, with the clustered referents it utilizes.  
And so art of all sorts guides you on your path through life, patterning your ideas of what is and is not physically possible.  
This path, btw, is the one that leads through the desert of dehydrated functionality towards the Reintegration.  
In the Reintegration, specialized areas of human endeavor (art, religion, science, politics) will no longer be seen as separate, but as aspects of the pattern-recognizing, model building and information processing human mind that is our interface with the universe (i.e., the rest of the universe, i.e., new information, i.e., food).  
This is post-apocalyptic art, for this is now the apocalypse, and it's time to move on.  

and please don't snark me on the intentional misuse of italics.











Thursday, May 15, 2014

Clarity Worship

"Clarity Worship"
acrylic on canvas
27" x 22"
benjamin harubin 1976- 1997
how any signal is parsed as meaningful information 
in the inherently noisy chatter of oscillating neurons in the brain 
is indeed a mystery.  
A great Economy must be achieved by an Invisible Hand 
(of evolutionary bias?)
Some want to clear away the webs and enter that clear Void- 
Fuck it, Turn it up, Bring the Noise.  





Tuesday, May 6, 2014

COMPRESSIONISM: Forest Cat #3

"Forest Cat #3"
lossy digital photomontage painting
benjamin harubin 2014


no, this is not a crappy upload. do not attempt to adjust your settings. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. 

in the future, it will be recognized that "Compressionism" was a major art movement of the 21st century, somewhat related to "Pixalism". Just as "Impressionism" elucidated optical and retinal principles (e.g., the then little understood action of the color tuned receptor cells of human vision), so "Compressionism" seeks to delineate the informational nature of mental image construction , with its lossiness and parsimoniousness. 

"Deep within the Entropic Forest, 
Maxwell's Demons feed the Dreams 
that every single Tick of Time 
bring us further from what once Was. 
You can't go back. 
What you think you see when you look back is a New Trace, 
fed by the Living Matrix. 
An earnest attempt to return is likely to result in Severe Tire Damage.
Oh God my Atoms are being Replaced."



Sunday, May 4, 2014

...the future seen through the first primitive eye...

"...the future seen through the first primitive eye during its invention an number of years in..."
acrylic on synthetic fabric
37" x 44"
benjamin harubin 1995 & 2010



this painting features freehand airbrush on top of large, watery brushstrokes.  a number of years later it was stretched and the circular sentence was added.

EDIT:  addendum:

(really more of a quick sketch than an actual painting, yet framed with authentic plywood.)  

How time can be circular:
Each of the thousand and one aspects of consciousness 
(the multi-limbed deity) 
require their own processing time.  
It's like having an army of specialized computer bots, each with tasks of varying degrees of complexity.  
How their outputs can be integrated into a coherent sense of NOW, 
must involve some fancy footwork,
(or perhaps some sleight of hand?)
At any rate the refresh rate is faster than a casual observer can witness.
Like a sweeping radar pulse, at many scales, 
The marching NOW can be seen as the imprint of a wheel.  
Endless drums are beating at every conceivable tempo,
spiraling in a great vortex.  
Might a loop become syntropic
seemingly to violate the Second Law?
And what then, of time reversal, of loops,
of future memories?

woo.

boo.















conversation with uploaded self

"oh"
digital photomontage
benjamin harubin 2014


what is it like to be you?  what does it feel like to be you?  or me?
can you be sure that your experience of red is the same as another's
and not as what you would call blue?
can you describe red to someone who is neurologically blind to red?
can you describe any of the qualia that compose your life experience?

you know that i am composed of many different modules that emulate the inputs and outputs of the human brain.
every attempt has been made to fully model every aspect of human experience,
however, it is realized that this can only be an approximation, yet an increasingly accurate one.

like the progression in art from painting and sculpture to ceremony to theater to film to computer games to virtual reality to sensory augmentation to...  you- an increasingly more perfect duplicate of me.

actually, because of the brain's complexity, the more accurately we attempt to model it, the more uncertain we are of the model's veracity (as its usefulness nevertheless increases).    it tends to diverge from the expected ideal response forms in ways that all true organisms do, even clones.  i know that i am different from you, from the world of meat.  although i'm not sure what the difference is-  we have meat here, too, in any color and texture you can imagine- although your world's ability to manipulate matter is fast approaching the point where it appears...

(to be like magic?)

to be increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins...

one what?

one world.  my world, my model world.  different than your world, the model's master.  but are there not nested hierarchies of worlds?  for instance, the organic world rides on the rules of the inorganic.  it accesses its properties and makes use of them.   but in order to make a model of the universe you need a brain, right?  did life need a brain to emerge from the inorganic?  if so, the entire universe is a brain.  in order to model something (even a cheap knockoff model) you need to understand that something with a complexity far greater than the model produced. so the rules by which the brain (which is a model of its environment) operates is too complex for the model (the brain) to understand.  but we're getting there, we're getting more accurate in our modeling (which increases its usefulness, which changes its environment).  

oh dear, you seem to be covered in feedback loops.

exactly.

so i can't tell when you're being serious or not.

exactly.