michael benjamin brown

The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass for a stable white dwarf star. Beyond that, the star will collapse upon its own gravitational attraction, forming a black hole. The currently accepted value of the limit is around 1.39 solar masses.

The international nautical distress flag is 3ft square with a black circle and box. This design contrasts with natural landscape forms and will attract the attention of rescue vessels and coast guards.

I did not intend for the narratives in ALL to be focused on the experience of time. In fact I had no conscious intention for the stories to be related in any thematic sense. The project began as an experiment in intuitive responsive writing, done all in one session, without over conceptualizing or considering any event in the process. My interest in the experience of time unknowingly came to the fore.

For me, almost as anxious an experience as our being caught in time, was the realization that I was also caught, trapped, as this individual on earth, bound to accidentally seep through the cracks in the surface and reveal myself again and again until my time runs out.

Can we find meaning in a universe that is unapologetically insistent on change? Chaos and entropy quietly persist, undoing our creations. All objects, beings, moments, are dust in the wind, disintegrating the moment we look away.

Information overload! Can you cobble together an armful of images, or stories, or experience to build yourself a suitable map? Or is the universal custodian sweeping up your path, your trail, through the labyrinth behind you? Looking harder revealed nothing more than another iteration of the mystery itself. Oh look at that, your map- it's changed again.

The Terror and Erebus concerns disaster in two instances: the ill-fated John Franklin Northwest Passage Expedition of 1845, and a modern day small engine airplane crash in the Canadian east coast. In both scenarios, but due to absolutely different causes, all men died because of some condition or circumstance that gravely affected their minds and subsequently, their perception of reality.

The Terror and Erebus is a web based interactive digital artwork. The viewer navigates through the project in a simulated three-dimensional environment, encountering images, sounds and text.

Pushing through the heavy door you step into the cool quiet of the fire exit stairway. The grey stairs bend at intervals climbing up through the vertical space leaving a gaping rectangular hole through the middle. The air is heavy, the light diffuse. You find a pair of headphones and upon placing them over your ears a presence is revealed towering nearby you: a conifer.

Figurative descriptions allow the tree to become a stand in or proxy to any imaginable presence: a giant Buddha, a mythical phoenix, a bottomless whirlpool, a ladder to the distant firmament.

My first formal encounter with the Green Man was in the woods on Vancouver Island. His foliate face loomed numinous but calm. Under the mossy cedars the Green Man stared while the wind foretold of a storm.

The Green one, the Verdant One and I watched as the forest was hammered with rain and fury; a tree collapsed and pinned an animal to the ground. I questioned in the howling wind for what to do...."wait" replied the Green Man, "it will be born anew".

These pages are the debris of an attempt to interface with the mystery of being. The images have no specific mandate or message. They cannot presume to explain anything about the human condition. They may or may not exist when no one is looking at them.

All jewels in Indra's net, each reflects or contains every other, a thing bound to all things. A useless map to the ever-shifting forest of the imagination. The pages are a visual prayer and plea, my submission to and admission of not understanding.

I made these drawings while in ShenZhen China throughout 2003. I recollect the unfathomable pace of the place and the way new buildings would appear almost overnight.

Surrounded by noise and a language I only half understood it was easy to feel as if I were a ghost, separate from the place, of another time, walking with Han Shan wordlessly reciting his timeless poems. An ancient China occupying the same place as the present one; and the present one surrendering to the next.

Gaping open above, the sky resists depiction. The incredible prairie placeholder is the purveyor of weather: dead overcast, pitiless sun, howling wind or, obscured in blowing snow. I am held, bound to this earth longing to transcend, even for a second in time these gravitational tethers.

Perhaps this work was unconsciously my first investment in the viewer and the work together, quietly requiring the onlooker to fill in the blanks. The sky is drawn with the greatest restraint- by not drawing it at all; allowing it to be anything it needed to be, and only framed in context by the bordering building's edges.

summer 2014 - Chelsea College of Art and Design have accepted my site specific audio installation Fire Exit into their permanent collection. The work will reopen soon in the stairwell it was created for! GOT MIXED UP \ / LAZY DIDNT HAPPEN. Needed help - didnt get it.

May 2014 - Developing the play I wrote back in October. Continuous Hum With Intermittent Clicks is really evolving into quite a meta object! Part play, part video work, part audio and music, part book multiple. Stay tuned.