Alive in the Hive

 

The Right One?
benjamin harubin 2024
7" x 15" x 4"
acrylic, found objects, green LED, steel gallon can

#expressionisticsurrealism #philosofart #upcycling 

I think we should all agree that one requirement for a thing to be considered alive is that it maintains a volumetric boundary, one that is semi-permeable yet contains a distinctly different composition inside of it than outside of it.  

These blobs and bags are now everywhere thanks to the proliferation of one dimensional strings of words projected upon the flat plane in the brain.

Are they all alive, these membranes amidst, through and atwixt others, like a part of you or a half of you?  

This thing on the screen that points to a thing that if examined closely enough has a clear form with a surface you can trace.  

It is said that you can create a thing that takes on a life of its own. 

These things in my room: is it me or the buffer zone?

You can't get away from it.

 

Got to get back to earth.

Got to go home and connect with the mates; my cells in the matrix.  

Discontinuities

 

Discontinuities
benjamin harubin 2025
16" x 11" 
acrylics and ink on cotton fabric

there is no sequence; no preferred place in history.  

every awareness is at its peak.

this is it.

The Present Is Not Timelike There
benjamin harubin 2025
11" x 8" x 2"
acrylics & collage on wood

artmaking is a kind of magical ritual in that it is a series of actions focused on achieving some particular goal.  it may seem like such things as art, magic and religion are a far cry from other kinds of focused actions such as in a lunar exploration program, but everything serves some tangible purpose.  a change in consciousness most definitely will affect the physical world (as if there really is a physical world separate from a metaphysical world).  as if you could tell.  yeah, but i read a book.  i like it but what does it mean?  meanings are temporary associations between neurons.  yeah, but if you found a watch in the wilderness and you had never seen a watch before, wouldn't you think that someone or something had designed it?  if, in days long ago, someone had found some random piece of trash from the twenty-first century - a piece of bubble wrap or a broken plastic robot toy - they would take it and put it in a shrine or a cabinet of curiosities.  that is what i am doing; gathering the amazing wealth of discarded bits from everyone all over the world - a word here, a piece of crinkly plastic there - and placing them in shrines.  they are reminders of the complex world market organism.  they tell stories.  they are portals to other dimensions, mandalas to assist meditation and lenses to focus the greatness.  anyway, stop asking me what it means because you don't even know what you mean when you say what you mean.  art may have no meaning but that it has important functions.  "how does it function?" is a more meaningful question to ask.  lol.  the nerve bone is connected to the other nerve bone.  let me untie it: art functions as communication across time and space, to unite the human race - or maybe untie the human race - from stubborn tendency to regard everything as black or white, left or right.  it's the philosophy of complexity.  and getting any kind of satisfying answer pales in comparison to the joy of further explorations of the unstoppable plenum. 

Jizzneyland Evolution

 

Jizzneyland Evolution
benjamin harubin 2025
14" x 12" x 4"
acrylics, found objects

while we were busy dissecting the language

each disturbance produced additional perplexity,

we hadn't noticed that above and around grew additional tendrils and veins

it's alive she said we said they said

words spilling endlessly streaming

fluid, uncertain, with the force of bricks:

ancient, relentless, definitely leaves a mark

who are you to it?

are you relentless? 

relentlessly peering to see the future in clefts between syllables,

unlabeled embryos emerging

which future? they ask as if they are the only voice,

but they are already here in plural

exposing the frightening possibility that we have simultaneously more 

and far less freedom than could be imagined

and that goes for them, too

Me & Mine Mind's Eyes

 

Me & Mine Mind's Eyes (v 1.2)
benjamin harubin 2025
13" x 6" x 3"
acrylics on egg carton & wood

Every breath you take
Every move you break
Every bond you make
Every step you take
I'll be watching you                

eh, fuck the police (and the mind police)

you, talking to who, you?

everything everything you think

is also thunk to you, through you;

everything you think you are is also a passage

logically we must consider the membrane (or the virtual membrane if that's your kink)

dualists and dualism-denying dualists neglect the interfaces

it's just one membrane folded here and there; 

a million folds in the volume of a grapefruit over here; 

a gently ruffled mountain over there

information at every scale looks similar 

there is one infinitely recursive wrinkly sheet, 

an excrescence here, an invagination there-

and holes!  

you've got to have holes in the sheet, in fact that explains ghosts.  and sex. 

it's the rude eruptions and untidy corners of existence wherein fresh insight arrives

the odd turn of phrase allows the cosmic to seep between the folds

look out

 

Terrifying Signage

 

Terrifying Signage
benjamin harubin 2024
13" x 9"
 pencil, ink & collage on paper

if modern art is a joke, and post-modern art is the punchline, are we in the uncomfortable silence now?

now that all that fat chatter has condensed and fallen, nothing protects us from cosmic rays and electromagnetic waves.

we all go back to basics: twitching and squirting; northing and southing to the frequencies.

in space, no one cares if you're cringe.

now that all information has been deintegrated, nothing protects us from blooming and buzzing.

just what you wanted, right?  long live the new flesh.    

in Life, everyone can hear everything. 

you hear a humming

Inevitably Telepresent
benjamin harubin 2025
24" x 18" 
acrylic, wires & string on eroded wood board

you're walking through a desert

there are cliffs along one side of your path

you continue walking until you see a cave opening in the cliffside

you climb up and peer into the entrance

in the brilliant light of your phone you see what looks like an ancient temple carved from the solid rock

on the walls are painted reliefs

of innumerable deities ?  

a pantheon  

pantheons? 

this is where you may be feeling a little faint

you seem to intuitively grasp meaning in the intricate art

depictions of stories— hunts, battles, liaisons, romances, conspiracies, cancers—seem to be woven into the background between gods, aspects, demons, angels and agents engaged in constant conversation

the fractal complexity of this buzzing web reveals a history of billions of years of interactions that are color coded like some mad detective's final phase

you see mutations, agglomerations, wars, divorces, permutations, parasitisms, conjunctions, capitulations, cavitations and murmurations

which you also hear—as a dictionary of chanting

the deities speak, the vowels and consonants each a spell that binds you until the next pulse

in horizontal and vertical hierarchies in lawful exchange, but the law requires each iteration to be a little blurrier and more general and more fluid than the one below/before

in the beginning was The Word

BUT

then there was another word 

but

you see patterns at every scale until the limits of perception are reached

there is no singular underlying force—unless it is that ultradiffuse radiance reflected off dust grains drifting in the medium of you—the medium of breath

you have a mouth and you shout

in this instant there is an eternal resonance

you are standing in the wave

you are standing waves

Incipient Spheres of the Exploding Connectome

Incipient Spheres
benjamin harubin 2024
7" x 10" x 4"
acrylic, found objects, black LED, gallon can

suppose we all feel it

life and death

sorrow and joy

in all the cells of the global organism

the people over there

on the other side of this nascent blob.

we felt it in the mediums

chemical electrical magnetic media.

you don't even need ETs or deities

you can encode information in a connected intelligent system

in any number of ways.

everything leaves a trace

even before the internet was born

even before prokaryote was born.

listen all ye

we are in the jelly

in the aether of ALL of US.

the jelly wiggles

and it's wiggling so much we can hardly find any wiggle room

like a tragic bark upon a romantic painting.

but listen all ye

if you can receive 

you can also transmit    !

the art: 

it clearly shows the incipient Spheres bathed in cold dark dusty plasma

surrounded by the ejected crust of its former existence. 

save this work.  find out how. 

Will of the People

 

Will of the People
benjamin harubin 2025
14" x 11"
acrylics, paper, pencil, ink & plastic scraps on canvas

going into hivernation now

while the icy wind knocks down the stands

diving into damp soil

when the sky above is fire

the nail that sticks out gets hammered down

but when you squish a thing it squishes out somewhere else

let's create a plasmatic evolutionary biohistory of human culture; art, politics, war, &&

what are the people/ what are you?

and what's the purpose of a trillion dollar black mirror?

(from the perspective of a plasmatic biological analysis 

of a web of inseparable thinking systems 

such as machines and humans also dogs and cats, bugs, smaller bugs 

and sorry, but yes rocks and dirt.)

are we trying to see who or what we are?

what's the rush?

or is this just humans gotta human?