Certain Portions of Matter is a hybrid film that creates a manifold portrait of physicist Albert A. Michelson, whose experiments are cited as those which led to the disappearance of the luminiferous aether, a postulated cosmological medium necessary to explain the propagation of light, prevalent in the physics community through the early 20th century. Beginning as an adaptation of the existing biography The Master of Light, written by Michelson’s daughter (Dorothy Michelson Livingston), the film will transform over the course of its run-time into something more speculative, blending historical research, reperformance, fictional, and auto-fictional elements in order to construct a layered essay wherein the aether is explored in its historical context and simultaneously as an actual substance and metaphor for loss, both personal and environmental.