APPERCEPTION

My initial impuse to create Apperception came in 1976 while reading J. T. Frasier’s “Of Time, Passion, and Knowledge”. In it, Frasier identifies five categories of time, listed here with my own terse descriptions: Atemporal: all at once, simultaneous Prototemporal: cardinal; countable but no preset order, sequence determined by probability Eotemporal: ordinal; has linear sequence but no development or preferred direction cause and effect are indistinguishable Biotemporal: has a “now” Nootemporal: includes language, generative consciousness I was attracted by how his temporal categories compared with Sergei Eisenstein’s categories of montage; they seemed inherently cinematic. To construct “Apperception”, I used a variety of technologies: HD digital video; 360-degree motion video; MAX/MSP/Jitter (for both programming and audio/visual processing); Apple Macintosh computers; acoustic, electric and MIDI guitars; a hardware/software system JackTrip running over the internet between towns; and a selection of audio pedals. To model the atemporal, the obvious strategy would be an all-white screen, with white noise. Yeah ok, but by definition no conflict. Not very cinematic. So instead, I slide into it, with each shot starting in motion then freezing and developing toward simultaneity, adding all new data toward white noise and white image. This “sliding into” the atemporal I also think of as a loop from the more complex temporalities. For all of these temporalities, I used the cinematic “shot” as temporal context.