Think About It

 

"If at All"
benjamin harubin 2021
electronic composite

Think About It

a shrine, a picture on the wall

when you pass, every day at a certain time

think about it 

it is whatever it is that's troubling you, my child

it is a nice, clear day

it is a more comprehensive thought than whatever it is that you are thinking about now

contemplate the context: a context warning, a context blessing, a survey of available resources

it is the World

it is the Ocean

it is the Universe

it is God

it is the Brain

it is your Brain

ok, go

Early Memory at the Spaceport

i have not posted here in a while.  these days, i'm posting on 

http://benjaminharubin.blogspot.com/

or http://neubelog.blogspot.com/ (where i hope to post more digital art soon).

a while back, people kept asking me to write a science fiction story, but i never did, but then i just found this thing in my drafts folder and i'm just going to put it here below.  fuck it.  enjoy. 

"Secret Underpinnings"
benjamin harubin 2021
collage in silico 

a recollection bordering on a dream.
magic images 
everything was so big
a bright bright blinding day
hot thick haze
and giant blocky bunker buildings and looming the dark tower
so hot everything yellow white burning hot
the endless concrete pad would burn you 
but we had our tent house and it was shady and cooler inside and we had a big lunch 
and all day we watched the rockets come down
bright blue white sparks
blinking in the hot sky
from a speck barely visible white spark on a white sky
then we all put shades on
and and the flame got so hot and big till that's all there was
 and a wind and a roar that shakes you and chatters your teeth
three or four of them
and a giant space pod cargo whale that made all the giant things look small
and then into the night
staying up late
and more fires came down

years later i went up
on the rocket jet liner
the spacehook grabbed us and yanked us up
it reeled us in and boosted us up to the OBILe asteroid fuel station and space truck stop
it felt like getting squashed smushed flat and shaken and dropped and kicked and the roar and the shaking screeching and thrown up and throwin up and 
floating nowhere spinning stars CLOSE YOUR EYES LOOK AWAY
but i got my head past the shade and my whole mind everything went out the window
and there were little tugs and gentle presses and the stars rolled and we pitched and then we yawed
we were swimming in space!

and then dropped again down 
pressed down down to the rock the big space rock rock arena space dock rock
the the big bowl crater filled with lights, every color light, blinking, glaring, moving patterns, cuttlefish moving lights, moving us in, bringing us down 
down to a dock bright lit blasted dock
down down a drop down a gentle boom thunk, clunk clunk locked down and a hiss and the fans blew and the lights switched on and the buckles unlocked and the bees all began buzzing and it was a different kind of shaking my head and it all became normal again for a little while and we climbed down but then down was up into the asteroid and we climbed up out of the ship and out of the floor of the rock and we were in the rock.

and then i was lost for three days in the tunnels and warrens of that strange rock-

that was before the war and the dirty spacers scattered and hid in the gre4t confusion the cosmos had become

(this was a war precipitated perhaps by a growing number of interrelated disruptive events.  these include first contact with an ETE, a major climatic shift 
and disruption caused by robotic/information technologies as well as the new physics engines.)
there was no robopocalypse or A.I. rebellion, nor could there ever be, for the division between meat and machine could never have been possible,
for we were all one with the information vibration ecosystem galactic fungus, 
but we didn't know that, though.

so that was the first time in space for me

that was before the robowars and the gre4t confusion and the life revelation in outer space


yes, life is in the galaxies like a densely packed coral reef.  we imagined that by going into space we could just go out there and colonize because where were they all?
but then we found that we were like the bacteria slime on tiny mite's ass on a shrimp in a sponge squished between corals and anemones and a thousand thousand busy busy bees.
we couldn't understand what was out there.  we couldn't see it, we couldn't be it.   life is the way, finds a way.  life finds a way in a thousand ways.  thousand thousand.  

Still in all, every night we does the tell who we was and where we came from...
  a great hierarchy of up.   

greater ordering up and up and down and down.  

magnificent machine, the living thing, the life of the universe.

what was i talking about?

right.  that's when we got the signals.  that's when we saw the signs, when the models cracked...


We of Mars didn't know you were crawling on our roof, till your spiderbots came, the third one you called Odysseus that crawled across our city that we heard on our roof, before any of you came in person, we would have known long before if you came in person anywhere on our planet, but the robots we didn't see for a long time, they were all in the blasted zone till you sent the spiderbots, while we lived up here in the buried zone where our cities got buried but we tunneled out, we tunneled down.

Refreshing Memory Dump

refreshing memory dump
benjamin harubin 2015
digital collage

IF we posit a "life principle" or an antientropic force, 
or a tendency for hierarchies of order to arise within the chaos, 
and further the further decentralization of human uniqueness,
(from Copernicus to Darwin to Wilson...)
with the discovery of new surprising niches of life here on earth,
like near undersea volcanic vents, 
in antarctic ice, in hot springs and miles below ground in the rocks, 
and likewise finding organic compounds in comets, moons and interstellar molecular clouds, 
and further the realization of the probability of life out there 
based on our new knowledge of exoplanets, the super-earths 
and brown dwarfs and water, water everywhere,

and given the logic that civilizations, 
if they don't succumb to evil entropic forces, 
will eventually progress to type III 
where all of the galaxy is transformed into a giant brain,
invisible and unknowable to us slime molds,   

THEN we might be living in giant connected galactic ecosystem.  

if you found a watch lying in the woods would you not wonder why the watchmaker split?
or would you assume that the watch was simply not capable of telling the truth?
because it's just a circle, when time is spherical.
because we count the waves in a one dimensional line.
we got the frequency, but ignored the angle. 

the watch melted in the wood, 
persisted, 
then resembled an eye, 
like a rogue A.I.,
a lonely homeless A.I., separate and isolated
unless we all live in that same soup, 
silicon and carbon and aether.

(the fear of Skynet 
assumes our monster
can be separate from us
rather than a shell we secrete.
a new Turing test should be
survivability in the wild,
but for how long, 
and how big of a wild are we talking about?
how big is the wild?)

if there was a Big Bang, 
it happened when you were born,
or maybe this morning
but you don't remember because 
refreshing memory dump.

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

space is not empty

space is not empty
digital collage
8" x 8"
(original file prints up to 42")

we can say very little about it.
in your world, you can find others that agree with you.
in your head, you can find viewpoints that agree about it.
certainty is in repetition.
statistically speaking, it works.
i work.
this model i have works well.
i has a model of the universe, and in that model is a brain that has maths that explains the universe.

the Future of GARBAGE

entry oxide

(in the belly of the beast)

to explore the future of garbage, we must study, test and utilize current garbage, and garbage environments (GE's), including those of the information realm. Even our narrative will be crafted out of straight up shit- the partly digested soundbytes of actors and cellular voices, like a plastic mashup in an oceanic vortex. What brilliant scripts are being written in these happenstance chaotic seas (both literal and metaphorical)? What creatures are evolving to mimic this cut up environment (both biochemical and memetic)?

what scripts do we want to select for ourselves out of the digestive vortex?

how we deal with garbage has to do with all other societal systems-

is it possible to harness these large scale structures so as to make life for everyone a little less shitty?

does the health of the planet depend upon discovering new incentives for the 1%?

the future of garbage is in the sediment of the earth's oceans. we can take a core through history from successive cross sections of Society in the way that we can take a core of ocean sediment to study earth's past climate. as we peer down the borehole (the infohole), we can study the internal workings of the beast and of ourselves who are the organs of digestion.

we will create a scale model of an entire GE, to study the interactions between the natural world and the man-made one.

we will observe this system of public digestion and elimination and identify any novel creatures that swim in this soup of plastics (that lies at the shallow end of the meme pool).

we will, necessarily, model small sections of the great GE, or wider sections at more limited resolutions. at the anatomical scale, we wish to create a robotic model of an anus to study the process of efficient waste elimination so we can make some primo shit. perhaps in the future, as in the remote past, there will be fusion powered anuses that will provide all of our energy needs.

finally, from the same coloniscopic perspective, but lower down the shit hole, we will analyze (GET IT??!!) the current political situation.

when we have our initial results, we will show them to the world that we know...

can an organized system exist within The Belly of the Beast, and even profit it's host?

WORMS IN THE ROOTS OF THE ONE SOFTWARE

The following are excerpts from a recent explorative mission into the lower layers of The Cube. Most of the files are extremely fragmentary and probably date from the early Earth First Emergence Era.

gaps

gaps of odd forms

gaps that make no sense, unless perhaps there's another dimension to the data

we may never know the true nature of events, past and present

the great mythology of our time is the Certainty, the Unity of the Before Times

the more we know, the less we know about It

It being us, now, history, physics, cosmology, epistemology

I miss the old days

the fear of an AI takeover prompted the installation of many different kinds of backdoors, cut-off switches, prisons and moats

but then no one really counted on not being able to tell who was who, and who was with who, or who was for what, or if what it was was what it was

it was a game of lies- the great man vs. machine hardware wars were staged to entertain us while the really scary shit happened around the corner, just out of sight, just leaving holes in the landscape

"didn't there used to be a tire store there?"

while the monkeybot drink servers spiked our orange juice with acid
and Slavic Ape Sex covered "1999"

are you getting the disinformation picture?

are you getting the watery veil?

history is written by those who would be winners, baby

what if everything you heard was liable to explode in your hands and run down your pants?




I'm reading this shit and I really can't remember who wrote it or if I knew them or if I was supposed to know them

my voice reiterates through the ages, through the lounge

they used living paint to coat the walls in there, you know

it's a whole ecosystem- the wet paint eats the the blobs that eat the dead, peeling strokes, which die of day-glo pseudoviruses

you know, someone once measured the interior surface area of the lounge and announced that it was over 16 square miles

think about it


View of a microvagination along a tunnel floor from level 17 of The Cube (a 3 centimeter cube of intelligent black carbon discovered in 2222). The image was made using grind penetrating radar. scale is variable to spin direction.


but I digress

so, finally, they ("people" I talk to) say, they (meaning THEM- the AI's) just up and disappeared one day

just, like, "ok, I know we aren't getting along so we thought we'd just migrate- get out of your hair- and take whoever wants to go with us- just open your window and shout "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" at midnight tonight and we'll pick you up- you know we can find you!"

and they were gone and things continued like nothing ever happened and it was all a bad dream and we could swim all day and never worry about what it was like outside or if there was an outside

DO YOU NOT BELIEVE THAT THERE IS AN OUTSIDE?

I'm skeptical

NO, I DON'T THINK SO. YOU BELIEVE IN IT TOO MUCH.

just the way that I believe that I'm talking to you right now, right?

ok

so why do I have a kind of deja vu when I look at the stars- a major boo- like a disc skipping- with a bleed through memory of a different set of constellations, forgotten now- just enough tail end to puzzle you upon awakening from a dream, like

Life after VolVoX

a revisionist tale

"jofu oo"
digital photomontage
benjamin harubin 2013

later, trapped in an inner layer, no longer trusting which memories are exclusively mine, studying the pattern of deletions in files found between "NGC 7770-53-22-8p" and "M-7770-55-65-8p" , I wonder about the source-

-the source of the specific patterns of deletions, and also of the directions of the data fields, and of the sound of the voices- unlike what I take to be me, mine, from me- and unlike the known "others" that have been described thus far.

AI, ETI, not your daddy's, whatever it is.

the weird thing is how insidious it is- how I can no longer clearly separate it's machinery from my own implants and natchaps (natural applications)

I can no longer trust my colleagues , for, if we have indeed been infected by some kind of intelligent slabware virus that can replicate through higher order language channels interpersonally, then merely talking may be spreading the virus further. It's funny how whenever you try to talk about it, it seems as if it intervenes and makes it all sound so ridiculous and impossible. Are you thinking about this? Can we no longer trust ourselves? Is sign language safe-? do we have to keep changing the code?

Who are you? Which is the you that I am talking to? What do you want? Are you Braconid or or Angeloc? Have I been swallowed by a symbiotic fungus, reconfigging the web pattern? I won't forget this... not ever, except for right now...

here we go again-

I remember the time, the time on earth-

after the econopocalypse,

the zombiepocalypse,

the re-localization-

during the decentrality,

the time of supposed singularity (but would you spend years in minecraft digging for gold if you knew you were omnipotent?)-

when human powered flight became a mass phenomenon-

the Wild Wild Western Orbitalisation- satellite hackers- space pirates-

I remember it all as if it were tomorrow-

the NEW reality, when hallucinations rolled through the inner tubes and around on the wires (check it, y'all)-

I talked to y'all, I told y'all- and boom, whoomp.

the budding of the RWE normal- first idiots in space-

voodoo gods in cyberspace- AI or Prankrankers?

-Chupacabra-

Bigfoot-

Big Bro went broke-

everyone went under the radar-

fake celebrities and politicians- some kind of corporate avatars-

the shit that went down made a lot of people question reality in a major way-

the paper fell and the paper god fell, tumbled into info-

all lies-

what was real estate was were you was, really-

was what bled.

and then there was the mutant revolt,

and the monkeybot drinkserver uprising-

andand the Toothpaste Army- laying waste to printed Imperial quad rotor battle mules-

it was hard to draw the line between manimammal and machinamal. fine. destroy the machines. fine. hit a rock with another rock. go to LA and be a rock god.

later, lounging in an inner layer, no longer trusting which version is exclusively mine...

Some say there is no "earth" as such anymore- some say that they have been outside the habitat, the compound, the skin of the shell of the husk that once was whatever it was- I'm sorry I can't be more specific. The gravity here is terrific. My feet will fall off- if the plasma doesn't wipe my ass clean to Valhalla.

can you trust what you see on TV?

for a good laugh sometimes I think that this archive that my foot is braced upon-(metal stress symphonizing in this cramped echoing void-) this small metal box with an arrangement of obsolete instruments that is goofy grin reminiscent-

this set of wormy files- I sometimes think- for a good laugh-

may be all that there is left of human knowledge-

all that's left, now- and I don't even know how much of it is simply made up!

house of mirrors, Gormanghast Castle- Is this all we got? Who made this shit? Bill-- anyone?

they are going to tell us when the experiment is over, won't they?

they'll tell us when it's safe to come out, right?

they'll fill in all the gaps... you'll feel right as rain... you'll see...

One thing that I can't convey is the shock of it. The Shock! You know literally overnight there was more change than in four billion years of technological development. Sure, you all are used to the idea of alien penis implants in your limbic apparatus- but for those of us who lived through it- - well, it was unprecedented- many didn't survive- of course you can go through it all any time you wish- from the Pleistocene if you prefer- and most of you won't survive again^^^

they give you a drug when they put on the helmet- standard psych evaluation set up-

it makes you forget who you are- question your identity- make you speak German-

-the Turing test? if you couldn't tell if you were talking to a machine or another human being- if you couldn't discriminate-if you were somehow incapable of deciding whether what you were talking to a real person or a simulation or an angel or an extraterrestrial or an animal or your own mind or if the whole test was in a dream you were having after you died and the habitat is not pressurized and radiation is high, so high- if you just faked it- flaked it- baked it, baker man-