Echoes of the Past

...processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 

(The Anti-Timeist Agenda- part one)

"Predeceased"
benjamin harubin 2017
collage in silico

What is time?
Does it flow from a single source, read by the needle of consciousness, and pass into the oubliette of the past?
Are we standing in a river, never the same water again,
or are we floating down it on our way to the Death Sea?
Such is an insistence on this instant, this instant, while the past and the future are merely thinkings of things; memories and fantasies.  
But have some faith!
Do birds stop flying when you're not looking at them?

Imagine you're trapped in a giant eyeball, perhaps in nice tiny cabin atop an observation tower in the middle.
Light flows in through the pupil towards you- this is the flow of time, at the speed of light.
You can see that there are other openings, releasing dark sounds or gases or dust, each with their own rates, each intersecting and interfering with the others.  
Time is Plural.  
There are as many time streams as you care to notice, converging on your cabin, falling to the bottom, getting squashed, rotting and then getting sucked up by these other holes...  
Sometimes what goes in comes back out, echoed, but processed, compressed, retrieved from storage, emulated and hyperlinked. 
Never mind the moles.  

All in an instant.
Because you're just imagining this, right?
...And what are you?
The tick tock of a single clock assigned the task of coordinating the streams?
Or are you just standing too close to the cabin clock?
This convergence, this single clock is an illusion, however.  
It is a patch, a picture, a useful idea we call now, invented when first was uttered then.
The function of TIME is to extract useful information from multiple TIMES.
It's the TWiSM: the Timey-Wimey Spaghetti Matrix

Tectonics

Nugrug
benjamin harubin 2017
collage

Some say they believe in God and others say they don't or that they don't know.  
I say that human experience between all individuals is non-trivially similar in this regard.
Instead of God you might say Nature or the Government or the Past.
That is, there is some all-powerful force that is outside of you.
In all cases, there are unquestioned bases and unanalyzed assumptions, whether they be materialistic, theistic, animistic or etc.
Confronted with the ineffable vastness of conscious experience, 
we extract images, which extrapolated and reiterated, 
gain greater and greater weight and complexity 
to the point where now can say for certain what happened  
at 1 × 10^-42 seconds after the creation of the universe 
or how many angels can dance on the head of a fly's eye.  
We use these images to effect change in our experiences; 
to produce positive outcomes. 
We use these models to predict experience.
All of them are potentially useful, 
even as fragments folded again and again back into the ineffable vastness, 
resurfacing billions of years later, still influencing the collective structure.  






୫፥ງ

In Defense of "Art"

Any defense of monuments commemorating Confederate asshats citing the value of "Art" or "History" is completely bogus.  There are no such neutral or objective things.  History is fabricated by the winners, duh (albeit maybe "inspired by" actual events, or maybe not).  History is an art, and serves the needs of the state ("state" used in the broadest sense of the dominant power structures).  


Conversely, history and art can serve the needs of those who wish to fight the power; to right wrongs; to change the power structure and see justice done for the marginalized.  Hence we have revisionist history: re-writing the narrative to include that which has been glossed over in the urge to propagandize victory.  Thus we have such works as Oliver Stone's "Untold History of the United States".  But i don't think that this revisionism is destructive of the country; indeed it is a part of the country's (and the world's) process of growing up.  It is the process of coming to a new understanding and empathy for all of humanity.  

Artists have always been about this; telling truth to power.  Most of what we now recognize as the avant-garde in modern art was meant as a slap in the face to "the establishment".  Think Francisco De Goya.  The reason we know about many of these artists over their contemporaries is that they shook things up.  Think Edouard Manet, spoiled rich brat though he was, insulted the piss out of the comfortable propriety of the ruling class.  

 
All good art involves destruction.  The clutter of insidious complacent symbols of state oppression need to be periodically recontextualized and repurposed.  Our contemporary history of art is a series of rebellions; either reflections of (or initiators of) great social, technological, or political change, much of it ultimately judged to be for the better.  

Those people defacing and tearing down statues are artists as much as Picasso or Banksy.  They're making cultural statements.  Deal with it.  Is nothing sacred?  All art is culture.  Culture is a dialog.  Art is fungible; part of a conversation.  The conversation is the way that humanity grows.  The old school will try to preserve their (illusory) entitlements and prevent this kind of change, but, as always, they're on the wrong side of history.   

Where will it stop?  OMG!  I hate to tell you but it's never going to stop.  One day we will be flying the flag of the United Federation of Planets.
Should Washington's Big Dick Monument be torn down?  No, but maybe crown it with a Pussy Hat to balance the forces.  Or better yet, crown it with a Jimmy Hat, to prevent the further propagation of War Babies.  

I agree that we shouldn't forget history.  Don't melt down all these offensive memorials, some of them need to go into special FAIL Museums and Gardens of Shame, so people can remember the idiocy.  Ultimately they will be just considered kitsch, when they have been robbed of their force.  

Some say that these things are just a part of the charm of "the Old South" and a part of "heritage".  REALLY?  So, you're ok with big box stores and the destruction of neighborhoods, but you want to preserve some crappy statue of some treasonous slaver dipshit??

Walk Down the Aisle

close your eyes.

"Object Five"
benjamin harubin 2017
in silico collage

there is a voice inside.
there's a voice of clarity and sense
that cannot be properly remembered
because of how insane it is 
measured by the ruler of our outside lives.

the voice wants to come out.
i am the interpreter for the alien,
if you are wondering how a light-years-distant being
can speak in such an odd, yet rooted vernacular.

they scold us from either side of the aisle
and we are distracted willy and nilly;
yanked along- the stuffed animal's paw is stuck in the leash, clipped to the dog, who barely notices in it's romp.
and the hall is only rented anyway.

they shout Liberal and Conservative, 
Socialist and Capitalist,
Hope and Fear.
and when they got you locked
you can't see the complexity.
you can't see the stunning fractal beauty of this system of worlds.

they shout from either side of the aisle
but you can walk.
you can walk down the aisle
you can walk up the aisle.
walk up to the front
and speak.
now open them.

WE ARE AS PLANTS TO THEM

benjamin harubin 2010
human plant communion
poster

IF, as the dominant scientific paradigms of evolution and astrophysics relate, there are some billion habitable planets in our island galaxy alone and evolution has proceeded for billions of years,  then it is almost a certainty that there exist beings in our space that are millions or billions of years more advanced than us hoomans in intelligence.  In fact there would be hierarchies of beings, just as we see within ourselves a hierarchy of biological orders: systems, organs, cells, organelles and molecules.
Just so as a single cell can exist as an individual living thing, given the right environment, we can exist as individual beings supposedly alone standing on the Erth.

What is the difference between having faith in a near certain probability of extra-terrestrial intelligent entities and having faith in a supreme being and a whole succession of prophets and angels and such?

They are both similar, related activities of the creative, dreaming brain.

We would be as plants to them, to grow and to reap.

And anyway, diehards, even IF Erth is the only place in the cosmos with intelligence, or even life, you've got to wonder where all this intricate organization comes from, and choke just a little on the Anthropic Principle.
You've got to ask why the orders of organization should arbitrarily stop at our level.
And where do all these ideas come from (when in several isolated attics around the planet, people are inventing light bulbs simultaneously)?

What big Face is emerging from bioslime book?

We are as plants to them.

See what i did there?

How about a religion for the Post Ironic Age:  a fake religion, an agnostic gnosticism, a humanist mystery rite?   Oh wait...   You can't stop the Dream.