We can reduce these conditions to three fundamental scales. They form a circle, though are often thought to exist linearly. It is when perception begins to recognize this circular relationship that time necessarily ceases; so too does the distinction between self and other. So, it may be said that even the reduction of these relations to three scales fundamentally misaligns perception from the state of things. Never the less, it must be done in order to reach back through the circle and pull the remaining consciousness through. Macro; that which exists beyond the scale of the body, is necessarily prefigured by its scale not necessarily of mass but of time. Micro, that which exists beneath the scale of the body; this is also prefigured by its scale not necessarily of mass but of time. However, this temporal scale may be consumed by the body as it exists at this scale in a plural state. Corpus, the scale of the body; the regularly identified time scale as it is associated directly with a generalized knowledge of mass.

The break occurs when we see across the circle; when the broadest and most refined schedules are simultaneously witnessed; where the corpus becomes perceptibly irrelevant. That is where the slippages between characters will occur. Each story will be carried out in a distinct medium. The slippages will happen by shifts in medium, or rather out of medium all together.

There are several strings at play with one another; each very introverted and all reaching across time as they interpret from and assimilate to one another. The knowledge of the other is what – in part – destroys otherness and thus time and thus indicts the individual in an attempt at constitution. Each story is most readily indicted in the attempts at constitution of self when crossing a number of registers. These registers tend to be keyed to only a few sets which set the broader frame for the conflict between experience – or existence – and knowledge – or intellect.

On the way back from Trona everything is eye opening. The Louis Vuitton bags in the lobbys of ridiculously white hotels, the sounds of blundering drunks below, the Los Angeles sunrise.

The strangeness of the scenes are reminiscent of the reproductive experiments that failed once and again. We have not seen pictures of snow. We have not seen pictures of mad women that we have to hate. She is at large again.

The night she drank half a bottle of red wine, good red wine, and she was sad and quiet. I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn’t have a god, politics, ideas, Bukowski, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. Overhead a police helicopter circled over Hollywood.

| Stills from Angela Nothing Intro |

The contemporary city is more than ever defined in the wake of a relation game of
continuities and discontinuities, visibilities and invisibilities arguably best characterized
by William James as ‘reality falling in passing’.

The Spring ’08 MediaScapes Studio, through the study, conceptualization and conjectural
positioning of Los Angeles as the product of a series of recurring ‘nested genetic doubles’
will exorcise an encounter for forces of matter seen and unseen, extended over a time-
based narrative machine.

In asking what is L.A.’s New Orleans, or what is L.A.’s Abu Dhabi, or even L.A.’s
Middle East - not only a demarcated immigrant urban settling (“Little Whatever”) is
being implied, but rather nested spatiotemporal formations that redefine urban
morphology side by side with evolving cultural vessels that elliptically recondition place
on the planes of the real and the ghost.

The Fogbank emerges through those who seek to track the ethical force we use to
navigate its peculiar density. Previous models for Fogbank navigation couplings have
been shown as Chris Marker’s “The Zone” in Sans Soleil, Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” in
Fincher’s Fight Club or Godard-Lang’s “Ulysses” in Godard’s Contempt. These are
organizations of time and matter that proactively drive from nested mechanisms,
precarious genetic codes that can alter matter and bend with it as it is instantly inscribed
in culture.

The studio will be conducted as an essay film project (from film stills to direct cinema,
from cinema verite to sci-fi), with the ambition of producing what we’ll reductively call
documentary shorts, to be submitted to film festivals and other venues around the world.

There will be writing, mapping, modeling, art direction, shooting, vfx/animation, coding,
blogging, editing and performing components to the project. Knowledge of filmmaking
and/or visual narrative is a plus but not necessary, commitment to around the clock work,
unfamiliar schedules and insatiable curiosity for Los Angeles (even in the form of
hatred), a requirement.

| Troika’s “Anti Photography Spray” from Products for the future of Spying |

The brilliance of applied nanotechnology at work for the best of reasons. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals eat-through-the-ass-shit-through-the-mouth. As ‘man acquires depth in banishment from the Garden of Eden’, he covers himself, ashamed. Celebrity culture, turning that shame into fame - just trade a couple of letters - is a continuation of such banishment. We can recover our place among beasts with the use of nanotechnology and photoluminescence - by initially refusing documentary immortality - an ultimately not erasing identity but reflecting everything, especially our representation to ourselves. It will only be a matter of time until there is a ‘blur of the soul’, when all sense of depth and recognition of oneself is fully reflecting nothing.

On Thursday November the 15th of 2007, Geoff Manaugh, Editor and Creator of BLDGBLOG and Senior Editor of Dwell Magazine will brave his way through the flesh eating temptations on the bank of the 5 freeway to deliver a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The lecture will begin at 7.00 PM, and will be part of the MediaScapes lecture series, generously sponsored by OnMatter. Here is SCI-Arc’s official announcement, and here’s BLDGBLOG’s. As part of the event, we will be deploying some suspicious broadcasting scheme, possibly triangulated with others - possibly not. Either way, stay tuned.

Out to identify the players on this bending field. If you think you know any of these, email 002@onmatter.org or post a reply. We’ll keep exposing new ones weekly until we have them all down.

On November the 15th of 2007, Geoff Manaugh, Editor and Creator of BLDGBLOG and Senior Editor of Dwell Magazine will brave his way through the wretched fields of Trona to deliver a lecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. The lecture will begin at 7.00 PM, and will be part of the MediaScapes lecture series, generously sponsored by OnMatter.

|The Vortex|

We will track Geoff’s progress through the hooker-laden fields of Trona and keep you posted on his struggle with perdition.

| Overplayed: Paris Hilton and Osama Bin Laden in character |

“I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you.” (Act I, Scene III, ll. 32-34, p. 14 Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice)

1.

We have known for many years of the silent collapse of reality into a recurring state of perpetual disbelief. There are roughly four centuries between Shakespeare’s Shylock, Portia, Antonio and Bassanio and the Wachovski’s Agent Smith, Trinity, Morpheus and Neo – and it is clear that both sets understood and effectively played back the same network of relations.

While it is overstated that the role of the other in empire building is binary and vital, as in culture’s and civilization’s villains - loosely characterized today by Paris Hilton and Osama Bin Laden, it is unclear what to do with the parallel degree of alienization that the user exercises in traveling through the lifeworld matrix.

| Robertson Blvd. paparazzi swarm with Melanie Griffith’s kids in tow|

It is also becoming more obscure to what end this spiritual and social drifting is fed, a question that not so long ago was clearly answered by the stated religious and post death of God answer: some form of redemption, sometimes pagan and/or cheap, sometimes venerably religious and equally fois gras.

It should be apparent to anyone in enough pain to get their own (or someone else’s) cock out of their ear that the media is the unconscious brainchild, a sort of lubed up latter-day id, of an internal structural anxiety, driven by the love of thyself-in-pain - a new type of alien - sitting comfortably invaginated in us, while we dice our illiquid flesh to near death. These days, Shylock would no doubt get his pound of flesh carved out of Antonio without dropping a fluid ounce of blood.

2.

| Robertson Blvd. Scene: Agent 1 on street, Agent 2 on rooftop |

EXT - ROBERTSON BLVD. - LATE SATURDAY AFTERNOON

FADE IN:

AGENT 1

Make no mistake. We find no value in blue blooded critical distance. Commentary is stillborn and criticism is diabetic. Wit is the intellectual symptom of the paralyzed and impotent.

CUT TO ROOFTOP OF ALDEN STRUCTURE:

AGENT 2

I see you. There are more paparazzi swarming the window. I have no idea who is inside. NoMatter… Ok. Heads up. Someone is coming out. Agents in position.

3.

| Shylock in character: Mantell, Murray Abraham, Armstrong, Pacino |

Cellulose has, in its repertoire of combinatory possibilities, one attribute that surfaces above all: its ability to hold on to water.

As such, cellulose is in a primary strategic location for the hijacking of life making substance. It is essential in plant life, in close proximity to the invisible magic of photosynthesis and the visible feat of the structural logic of vegetation. It is also the basis of paper, the lifeblood -with the printing press, of the passage from a culture of present and survival to a culture of mass production, storage and moral accountability.

The index of cellulose presented as the opening act of OnMatter pretends to introduce the material in a state of flux or dubious visibility a few degrees of difference from its original, stable state. It is our assumption that the mutation of its genetic basis - as its goes through several iterations in the violent hands of forces of manufactured inhibition and exhibition, will bring out the monstrosity of its many possibilities as well as the conditions that give rise to them.

OnMatter is a trimester publication and a live-feed online log focusing on the offspring of cultural warfare and urban geography delivered through questionably credible architecture journalism. It will locate itself as the underside of National Geographic, positioned from the notion that the only wilderness left is one of pure cultural fabrication, consequence and force. It will be postulated not from theoretical speculation but from the critical survey of material, hence ‘matter’, changing in the wake of such forces.

The publication will focus on globalization as a reformed city-state geopolitic (as opposed to nation-state imperialisms), and it will thoroughly relate the issues back to commonly understood documents. The publication will seek to establish itself of essential archival value for the design global community through the freedom to create original content with only self-imposed barriers. Ultimately standing as an account for the hybrid complexity of contemporary matter, OnMatter will strive to make contact with the simultaneously visible and invisible, natural and alien and most of all, with the thing in constant phase change.