sending a message to the past

"Plato's Computer"
benjamin harubin 2014
digital photomontage

history been written and re-written many times by winners, losers and freaks.

in the future, your history will be re-written 15 million times.

i am learning to write in natural english for the first time.  you must forgive me, i am used to communicating in quantum fractal machine images.  

you think you are living sometime in the early 21st century, 
with a house, a wife, a car.

...


History as a discipline is not that much different from what you call physics, although physicists would beg to differ and claim they do it harder.  Whereas history is like a collection of stories, closer to art than to science.   Funny but astrophysics is full of stories of the past, like the Big Bang.  

Scientists are not standing around their tabula rasas, chalking notes impartially, describing strictly what they see.  Niet.
  
A computer brain can't even recognize what a triangle is- or if you're coming or going- without some serious algorithms, some sophisticated modelling.  This is what dumb evolution has provided for us as mammals. Now science is continuing the trend in the "conscious" mode.  This trend aims to increase the usefulness of our models, and hence our predictions, about the behavior of our environment and ourselves.  But you know it doesn't really matter if the models are absolutely true or not.  As long as they're beneficial, they are used.   There is a directional bias in the way that science evolves, as theories are modified and replaced.  The same can be said about any human discipline.  Who knows the ways of Fashion is the one who creates it.  The optimal scientific brain recycles, incorporates random elements and makes absurd associations.  The model (Relativity, say) is created long before the drama of matching it to observations is acted out.  And ideas go out of fashion.  In short, science is creative.  And we don't have such a handle on objectivity that physics and literature (art) are fundamentally different kinds of activities (especially from the viewpoint of the spectator, digesting a somewhat skewed and condensed version, and especially from the viewpoint of the participant, who can't see the forest because he's a dendrologist).    

When the fractal mathematics of these model building activities are better understood, will it be possible to re-write history, in actuality to violate the arrow of time, and send a message to the past

and say "hey, kid, it's gonna be alright"?  

Evolution on the Head of a Pin

"ma Pleg"
benjamin harubin 2010
digital photomontage

critics of evolution (namely, creationists or advocates of intelligent design) like to say that "evolution is just a theory", meaning, in loose parlance, guessy, uncertain and unproven.   it is a story, they say, among many stories.

rational scientists may concede a given amount of uncertainty, but will say that that is besides the point.  the value of a theory is in how useful it is, how well it plays with other theories, whether it can make successful predictions and whether results from experiments that support the theory can be reproduced.  it is also a valuable theory that provides new areas of study.  

a theory is not a tangible thing.  it is a mental construct.  it is an invisible scaffolding and its utility lies in the nature of what you are building.  

it is software, and is only useful when it is functioning.

you can't see something called "evolution".  it is not a thing.  or if it is a thing, it is a thing as big as the whole universe.   if you saw it you would be god or your head would explode (because antimatter).

you can see fossils, you can sequence DNA and you can compare phenotypes, but you can't see evolution.  evolution relies upon a massive web of interconnected disciplines, theories, and assumptions.  if you deny evolution, then you also deny geology, atomic theory, quantum mechanics, chemistry, materials science, cosmology, etc, and you must think that your MP3 player runs on dragon's breath and you are living in a freakin dream world.  

you can't see plate tectonics, but you can measure how much closer Africa is to America since last year.  

in other words, you can see bits and slices and tethers of "things" in a time web of memories, biases and assumptions (that is to say, models).  

science requires some form of independent verification (reproducibility), and so it also must necessarily involve more than one person and preferably a great consensus.   and this requires language.  science is an example of the trend of increasing precision in the use of language.   math, the language of science, is the most precise.   i must however point out that religion has its own need of language and has its own form of verification.  

the differences between the various models are a reflection of their specific functions.  theological models can be just as complex as scientific ones, down to centuries long debates on the estimation of number fnord of angels that can mosh on a pinhead.  

but i do not think that creationism or ID should be taught in a state funded science class.  aside from the principle of separation of church and state, it's false advertising.  

at least until the re-Synthesis, when information physics merge with thermodynamic evolutionary neurobiology.  when all facts become equal, each consisting of information, whose energy can be measured.  then, there will no longer be a clear distinction between science, religion, mysticism, art, politics or sport.  

when scientists realize the creative power of their models, they can make alternative futures of their choosing, like wizards.  

when religious engineers augment their practice with automation and algorithms, will the New Bionic Church churn out record numbers of the enlightened?

"embryo30"
benjamin harubin 2008
digital photomontage

when information reaches a critical threshold, where there is so much interpenetration of knowledge that we have entered a new kind of dreamtime, what will that big bad baby do, playing with a big blue bauble in space?

nepenthegrey

"nepenthegrey"
digital photomontage
benjamin harubin 2014

puzzlement of the mirror's reversal 

betrays the fearful framing of bilateral bias.

in the nebulae, the hand of bog revealed-

swamp gas?

-or the reflection of the Universe Intelligent?

whispering at the edges

"The Grunewald Transmission"
digital photomontage 2014

at a party
in a loft
inside an abandoned missile silo
at the mine base
of a spinning asteroid
(outer space is down, baby)
everyone and everything is speaking.

the walls are patterned with sound;
a myriad jiminys advise and inform;
voices come out of the rain of intelligent images
and someone even spiked the keg with audio cortex seeking nanobots.

we agree to hallucinate consensually,
our manners attuned to our servants,
our systems primed to discover meaning
in the smallest of details.

the grainiest of photos-
or a single photon-
yields data sufficient
to construct elaborate models
that interact with other models
always mutating
ever growing
even erasures
leaking volumes
streisanding the fame
hawking away
its innermost secrets.

Howl's AT-AT

Howl's AT-AT