While walking down 5th Ave., I happened to pass by a shop window that was exhibiting some of the season's new fashions. A casual glance about the display case was suddenly interrupted by the spectacle of a long-sleeved shirt designed by the fashion-house of Dolce & Gabbana. It had the most alluringly deep color: an interpenetration of blue and purple that was particularly impressionable to the light and changed according to my perspective. It was my first encounter with a moving material, and this most opaque of surfaces, asked, no, demanded to be touched!

Could I, in the most opulent of department stores, in the most universal of cities, in the most dominant of countries, conceive whither that initial caress would take me? It was the seductive touch of decadence.

It was velvet.

How can we take seriously anything that was inspired by a fashion?

First of all, one should never take seriously anybody who takes himself too seriously.

This is a temporary idea. One should change it as one changes underwear.

Now that we have effectively embraced a pervasive suspension of judgment, the Skeptic (epoche), why shouldn't we treat philosophy to the irreverence due to fashion? After all, aphilosophy of fashion, no less than a fashion of philosophy, is perpetually penultimate.

All this began with a shirt. It could just as easily have been a table-tennis ball, a distinct sound, an intelligent insect, a super-complex equation, a sequence of esoteric numbers, etc.

Even if one becomes conscious of a 'higher' state of clarity over time, it is either the case that cognitive impressions become more profoundóone 'perceives' betteróor, (and it is a devastating disjunction,) one merely increases the amplitude of self-deception.

You're just ripping-off other people aren't you?

Absolutely. This site was not conceived ex nihilo; its progenitor was drunk on other people's ideas. There is nothing wrong with this as long the effect is interesting. In any case, nobody should have a monopoly over knowledge.

What's the best way to describe this site?

Because of its mixed parentage, this site was was born resembling:

• The stinking feces of a flagrant parasite.
• A laughing abortion
• A metaphoric architecture,
• A replicative, symmetrical eight-pointed star
• A number of texture-mirrors placed strategically at each of the eight points of an Islamic pattern
• A very tasty rhizomorphic potato
• An assemblage of many Lines of Flight
• A game of depth
• The belated efforts a conceptual DJ
• A dead author
• A dialectical matrix
• A happy hunting ground for Heraclitian lightning
• A whole lot of ambiguous orifices
• A collection of strange masks
• A site of rupture,
• A tumouróa swelling of significantly dead unities.
• A toe in the river: one participates in the becoming-river, and the river enjoys a becoming-one.
• An exorcism
• A poem
• A methodology
• Fazionphilozofi
• A labyrinth
• A speaker
• A series of introductions.
• A series of advertisements
• Music
• A door in the Wall
• A virtual coffee-table book
• A dillettantish whim

Only the web made this possible. Like its enlightened predecessor, the technological machine enables the formation of a contradictory space: immaterial yet observable, immediate yet distant, absent yet present.

The web is nothing but an electrified phenomenology.

A community is defined by a common set of questions. What are some of the questions that directed the construction of this site?

• Is speech the projection of a collective complicity?
• Can you reinvigorate the said-before?
• Is truth experiential? Does it fluctuate over time?
• Can we learn to love authority?
• How do you escape object fetish?
• How do you overcome the persistent modernism in post-modernism?
• Can the palpable be made conceptual?
• How can texture be made palpable on an otherwise over-reflective surface?
• How does one make music with ideas?
• And how, how is one to persist? Questioning oneself: with whose thoughts and whose words? What if other people's words do not come easily? What if other people's purses do not come easily? What ifÖ? Our whole vector of being groans under the weight of this question.

Why Velvet?

A word needs to glow far beyond the sterility of far-flung electrons; it requires a certain myopia, a forced intimacy, a touch, so that its fuzzy warmth may protect us from the cold.

Conceptually, velvet is fertile in the texture & fold department: the shifting outside, folded and doubled, constitutes the inside. However, folding and doubling are processes which add a 'snag', a slight difference or rupture, at every overlapping layer. The nature and cause of these snags are uncertain, although we may presume that they are precipitated at some level by the interplay of a power-axis and a knowledge-axis. Nevertheless, this folding adds a dimensionality (depth) to the appropriated exterior; but it is one that is refracted at certain nodal arrangements (snags) by the very process of its constitution.

Where are you?

In you.

Why did you do this?

It enrages understanding, this bagel state of consciousness.

Why are there spheres in the Transverse?

In this age of incentivized laughter, the diamond of signification is rendered spherical by critical noise, thereby forming a heretofore-unknown surface of incredible dialectical density. We assume a crystalline sphere metaphor for concept: translucent, opaque, depending on the direction of observation; infinitely faceted, internally iterated, it tends toward refraction and respective reflection of what passes through and off its surface.

How can I become velvet?

Sprinkle yours thoughts with other people's poetry; drop a scented word in the middle of a sentence; detonate a stinker in your crowded arguments. Beware of over-reflective surfaces: too many mirrors strangle spontaneity and inseminate you with doubt. And if oneís existence can cause nothing but pain, then let pain be the provider.

Every now and then, insert a virus: a brief expository suppository left on the edge of the cosmic black hole, and imagine that it has the potential of reaching all, or perhaps, none.

Above all, take a deep breath everyday for the rest of your life

Do you accept that production is existence?

Thought, speech, sound, music, sex, words, poetry, logic, lyricismóbecoming-vomit.

The potential aspect of history is always the object of a brutal symbolic struggle. Every productive entity, individual or otherwise, insists on its own version of becoming: the blood-flow of flux, the steerage of the lightning bolt, the primacy of the vectoróall these constitute the bowel-movements of motion.

The question is no longer: where am I, who am I, why am I here? But: where am I going and how do I get there?

The solution for madness does not lie in the absurd accumulation of innocent facts, but in the violent imposition of a coercive complicityóa conspiracy against the future. In this struggle-for-space, neither intelligibility nor mystification serve much purpose.

Our only duty is to get lost on our way to work.

'Meaning begins with woman; totality is the fruit of her womb.' Do you agree?

I quote Austin Powers: 'I shagged her rotten baby!'

Who is not velvet?

I haven't thought of that yet. Any suggestions?