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.

Akzidenz Grotesk: (Berthold Foundry 1898). Even though Akzidenz Grotesk was technically released in the 19th century, it was certainly one of the most important typeface of the 20th century. In response to the Industrial Revolution William Caslon IV offered a monoweight set of capitals without serifs in 1816. In 1832 the Fann Street Foundry brought out a sans serif, which it termed a “grotesque”. By 1850 virtually all type founders were issuing such faces in a confusing variety of widths and weights. As industrial printing moved out of the dark ages, typefaces began reacquiring the sharpness and refinement they once had in transition to their modernization.

Futura: (Paul Renner 1925–1928). Because ideas are beholding to their instantiation, while the aesthetic principles of the Bauhaus formed the foundation of modern design, its aesthetics were beholding to the fieldwork of Jan Tschichold and Paul Renner. Students of typography know that in the early days of the 20th century Akzidenz Grotesk had already created the preconditions that would transform it into a century for sans serifs. Since Akzidenz Grotesk and Futura both came out of Germany, the inquisitive mind cannot help but wonder what accounted for Germany’s radical typographic bent. In retrospect it was the need for simplicity induced by the complexity of the blackletter, which plagued Germany well into the 20th century. Since the Bauhaus’s own dictum advocated for simplicity of form, it was natural that its practitioners would embrace sans serifs. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy said: "Since all existing grotesque book styles lack basic style, a grotesque still has to be created. It should share the designed form of engineering structures, cars, and airplanes. For the moment we don't even have a working style. It should be exceptionally clear and legible, free of individualism, based on a functional appearance, without distortions or embellishments." Its internal practitioners, however, were unsuccessful in creating a functional typeface within the Bauhaus ideology. Fortunately, the beginning of such a model was already in development.