Writing

Matter’s tendency toward entropy must be disrupted if ultramateriality is to push itself into the world. Ultramateriality is the surplus over and above the material. This temporal surplus is always pulled from within by the ever present weight of materiality to level its amplitude, to quiet its disruption. This pervasive pull encircles potentiality, limiting its flight, prescribing the inevitable decay of life’s orbit. To sustain life, ultramateriality must ceaselessly counteract its own encirclement. Since life must push against its own weight, suffering is. It must be, for suffering asserts not only itself; it is the surfacing of death. Since death is inside life, ultramateriality cannot surpress its emergence. To do so would deny life’s own preconditions. Instead, ultramateriality must persist in the face of death, willing to sustain suffering while pushing itself into the world. The will to persist comes through the acceptance of falleness. Death is not an exteriority which outstrips life, but the other way around. Life is the temporal surplus which elevates the ultramaterial above the equilibrium. This surplus generates the debt which must be repaid. Death recalls the surplus.

To breach the surfaces of existence, ultramateriality must ever equivocate between its physical and metaphysical dimensions of being. This equivocation exerts the psychic impetus necessary to rupture the superficies of temporality, whereby its subduction induces the upwelling of the smoldering passions stirring ever incessantly within. While that inner polymorphous magma is obfuscated by its contiguous surfaces, insofar as the crust of temporality cannot contain its psychic upthrust, human existence rests not on surface platitudes, but on the tensional tectonics of ultramateriality itself. Consequently, while the tension between the depths and surfaces of existence reverberate from the push/pull of interiority/exteriority, its deeper primordial resonance arises from the antithetical synthesis by which ultramateriality is constituted. Insofar as ultramateriality is the surplus, which overflows unto its material substrate and its toughness is that which suspends existence, it must, by its equivocation, transmute the physical/metaphysical divide into a psychophysical continuum if skirting the boundaries of being is to give meaning unto existence. Since the ability to breach the terrestrial divide is ours alone, those who cherish their humanity must traverse the metaphysical horizon within if the flames of care are to illuminate the abyss of the anaesthetic infinitude. To uncover the wondrous depths thence, layers of amalgamated excesses must be scrupulously scraped away to expose its silent splendor within.

In a universe so vast where humanity is not even a speck on a speck, existence itself is an indelible reminder of our own insignificance. Adrift in its unfathomable infinitude, being dangles ever tenuously athread the abyss. Isolated in this endless expanse, psyche spun a circuitous yearn to suspend its dread of emptiness, but that weave could not sustain the relentless drag of existence, ensnaring, thereby, spirit’s own demise in the tangle of its collapse. According to contemporary particle physics, microcosmic strings reverberates not from the invisible hand of God, but through their own proclivity towards entropy. Be it sub-atomic or intergalactic, matter’s cadence towards chaos echoes throughout the chasm in which existence is suspended. Contrary to diffusion theory, the universe end not with a whimper, but persists in its everlasting cacophony.

"Art and Ethics" is a complex topic. It can focus on the legalistic balance between the freedom of expression and ownership, and as society enters the information age, we must reestablish the fundamental balance between our commitment to democratic ideals and property rights. Despite the timeliness of this issue, however, I shall only in passing quote the words of Jesus: "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s," and let that serve as a guiding light towards finding a balance.

While virtually all graphic design professionals and educators alike profess typography to be the backbone of a graphics education, no design program has integrated the training necessary for its students to appropriately match typefaces to the mood of a document. Convinced that the ability to hear the inner voices of type was key to setting a document’s tone center, I was not only surprised that imparting that capability to students was absence from the curriculum, but even more perplexed that such a vital aspect of graphics education seemed to have so thoroughly escaped the attention of the experts since its omission is tantamount to running a music program without the benefit of ear training, a likely factor for the general typographic tone-deafness of virtually all graphic trainees. Disconcerting as that was, the above mentioned educational deficiency afforded me the unique opportunity to attune our students with the type of training that has hither to been unavailable elsewhere.