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.

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.  

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."

...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.

mohr dream portals

part of a continuing series from 2007-2011 or thereabouts (recently rephotographed):

"Sewing Machine in a Roman Bath (on purpose)"
19" x 22" x 4"
acrylic and pencil on paper on bark construction

Do any students of Surrealism and Microbiology get the mixed metaphor in the title of the above piece?

"There's a fucking explanation for everything"
19" x 18" x 3"
acrylic and marker on wood construction

"the future is in another part of your brain"
29" x 21"
acrylic on wood construction

dream portal dump

Long time between posts?  missing time.  revelations.  trials.  I'll fill it all in eventually.

This is a selection from the photographic record 

of some of my works from 2007 - 2009, during a residency in a luxurious basement studio (actually a great time) that i collectively call "dream portals".   

In many of them i used a technique that i call now "lucid drawing" in which the brain's pareidolic abilities are allowed to be transferred electrochemically into a durable dimension (that can be photographed).  

So indeed they are portals into alternate, ephemeral dimensions that are generally so barely glimpsed as to be instantly forgettable.  

You can imagine those Pleistocene hunters conversing with the shaman: "wait, you mean this shit is real?".

"...and the hunt was good, and we remember our hands, red ocher stained for weeks."

gate time half lock life star pig
21" x 36"
acrylic, crayon on wood construction

I C U scene Enuf
19" x 19"
acrylic on wood construction
privately owned

let me see planet
14" x 14"
acrylic and enamel on wood construction

triple XXXY theater presents the obvious results
20" x 19"
acrylic on wood construction

to no a veil
25" x 16"
acrylic, enamel on wood construction

HL machine vs PP eater
41" x 25"
acrylic on wood construction

ghostly encounters on the picture plane
30" x 30"
acrylic, wax, marker on wood construction
privately owned

jampact
11" x 7.5"
acrylic on wood construction

rewards of pretense
24" x 37"
acrylic, marker on wood construction

hooray for everything
37" x 19"
acrylic, enamel on wood construction

there's more in this series- I'll be posting some of them soon-

bloodroot vision

"What I say, George, 3X is true"
or
"geometry of bloodroot vision"
31" x 25"
acrylic, marker, grease pencil on paper on canvas on plywood

this is like one of those time travel dreams where you look into the mirror and see that there's a hole in your head (in addition to the usual ones).  
when you look closer, you see that there is a supermarket inside and you're looking down into it from a very high ceiling.  the shelves are stocked with jars filled with sea slugs, which are mating, except they can't reach each other.        
they begin to penis fence with their own reflections in the glass.  
you realize that you must free them before they stab themselves to death, so you must find the valve that lets seawater in and then open all the jars, but there's a fierce wereweasel roaming the aisles, looking for anything to eat other than sea slugs, with their undulating excrescences filled with foul tasting irritants.  
just then, a glowing wormhole bubble appears above you, disgorging intelligent reptilian anteaters from earth's distant past that are seeking a decent cheeseburger.  The expanding bubble of scaly limbs pushes you down through a point that intersects the path of the charging wereweasel, especially the hard pointy bits that surround its stinking mouth hole...




speaking of alien technology,
we have it right here on earth, surrounding us.
the pace of scientific/mathematical/informational technology is growing ever faster.
there's more new understanding of physical laws and interactions (not to mention the gizmos on the shelf) than any one person can ever comprehend-
 and it's getting worse.
when you find a eyeball lying around in the woods, do you a) call the police, b) try to see what you can get for it in a pawn shop or c) look for its designer?
why do you need a creator person that during a boring week creates ad hoc knockoffs of itself?  where will it all end?  (what I'd like to know is when did it all begin- when we figure out what happened in the first x femtoseconds after the big bang, will that suffice? -or do we then have to find out how The Simulators implanted the evidence for a such a beginning?)  ...wait...

isn't the universe itself (including us mound builders) big and spooky enough?

do you really need government scientists reverse engineering crashed UFO's or secret interstellar treaties that stipulate the dissemination of "contact" propaganda to prepare the humans for subjugation?

not that I'm saying intelligent extraterrestrial contact has not or will not occur.
but maybe any intelligence evolving to galactic standards would basically have no interest in other species, realizing that true weirdness (and true wealth) surrounds all of us, everywhere, and that one could never exhaust the possibilities of existence in even a puddle.  if you were, like, god, why would you really mess around with the planets?


so what does this have to do with killing dragons?










especially rubber ones that propagate indiscriminately...?










and what does all that have to do with the painting?








oh yeah, i'm glad you asked about that.   this one is a type of extended automatic drawing.   it started life some years back as a kind of doodle done with magic marker on a large white paper shopping bag.  recently the drawing resurfaced, whereupon it was bonded to a canvas stretched on a plywood frame.  then i added color with acrylic paint and contours with china (grease) pencils.   with these tools, i used the neural procedure of pareidolia to bring shapes into focus.  so to speak.  give birth to monsters.
since the original paper was quite thin (a plain white shopping mall type bag) you can see (click to embigify) wrinkles that occurred when the paper was bonded to the canvas (with acrylic medium).  you can also see some faint bleeding from the old marker drawing.  all these "random" elements are one of my principle enjoyments in making art.  i see my role more as an explorer of a strange land than as an autocratic designer.  although it is in the tension between these two things (accident vs. design or meaning vs. raw sensory data) that things get interesting.  so when you kill dragons, birth is given to all sorts of dramatic characters (including more dragons) that live their own lives nearly apart from the central drama.

ach, i could go on...