They wondered what would change if it was unnamed, so they unearthed a plane of (in)consistency preserved in a future stratum, the scape of an unknowable vitality, a worlding-with otherwise. Here, time is neither absolute nor relative. It is enfolded, mattered with substance, in a vortical—not vertical— manner. The lively matter of paint is temporarily viscous, and slowly, it dries from outside-in like the earth’s crust. When it dries, a portion of its matter turns to vapours, while dust carried by air incorporates the mixture. Patches form and collide, leaking into each other’s bodies. Crustal recycling continues and the lively matter of paint folds on itself, like metamorphic rocks when the elements make knots. Inchoate planes intersect, again and again and again. And on the adsorbate layer, new unstable substances permeate the petrifying whole. The lively matter of paint grows thicker and deeper and thinner and murkier. It is messy, never still, but it knows respite. Here, stories of matter-in-becoming are stories of de-stratification. Like the genesis of colour in ore formations, swarms of multihued contaminations produce unpredictable oscillations exempt of pure hues. Where nacreous and metallic actants merge in fossilized bodies, chromatic greys intra-act in the middle of everything, perturbing zones of vivid hues and crystalline oxides. Here, the ground is a turquoise field with brown tentacles, like copper when it grows in malachite. And here floats an assembly of purple organelles, under the topological layer of a strange bivalve-like figure. A bit further, an orbital bone morphs into a chrysolite host of tiny particles, like a pool of eukaryotic algae.