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.











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.