#john berndt

Michael Johnsen - Patience Tryouts (2003)

Carol Genetti - The Shattering (2000)

“Conversations” Episode 14: John Berndt :: Bret McCabe interviews John Berndt

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Experimental, Free Improvisation

My perception of a static object is temporal. The minute hand of an electric motor clock looks static to an instantaneous take—but it isn’t! Time must pass before one can judge whether the thing “minute hand” is static. Moreover, my view of a static object changes continuously; it is supposed to. I would have to have my head in a vice and my eyelids sown open to have exactly the same view of an object over any length of time. My view of a static object changes because I continually shift.      We may speak of time passing slowly or rapidly—what we mean is that we are bored or enthralled, for example. (Temporality is mood.) But whether time passes slowly or rapidly, longitudinal perception of a module (integration of an object) is felt to proceed at the usual rate. An abnormal rate of longitudinal integration of modules is very rare. (A state of shock, being drugged?)      My conclusion that the object is an object, and my conclusion that it is static, situate my perceptions in a theory called common sense. In other words, I construe visual apparitions as evidence of an imaginative fiction to which I have no access whatever: the objective static thing. What is remarkable is that my imputation of the objective static thing is reliable (not all imaginative fictions are so successful): but it is not always reliable and that is why common sense unravels.      [Again consider your perception of the minute hand of an electric motor clock. To an instantaneous “glance,” it looks stationary. One has to observe it over time to make the most basic appraisal of it as a thing in the world. Now suppose that time speeded up, slowed down, stopped, or reversed—or became so incoherent that past, present, and future instants were jumbled together randomly.      Actually, just to assume that you would live to see this catastrophe requires a profound imaginative division. Your life would already have to be frozen, like a film; then a god could string together individual frames arbitrarily. It completely destroys the force of causality as directional—i.e. the actual contribution of breathing, pulse, etc. to life. If you “existed” like scrambled film stills, how would you know that there was anything unusual about the minute hand?      Assume that the temporal anomaly only infects the minute hand. You would conclude that the motor was badly broken: an inference that situates what you see in a theory of causality. But if instants were jumbled together randomly, the minute hand would wink in or out, or disappear. The only notion you could use to interpret it would be that of a projected visual apparition. The “minute hand” could not be solid. If that notion failed, it would be all over; you would no longer “have a world.”]      The lesson here: “everything” takes time. Again, if we don’t take time, the minute hand of a clock is simply stationary. For that reason, an outbreak of temporal anomalies would not merely add magic tricks to technology’s repertory. It would shatter experience to smithereens. When physicists talk about how they can manipulate time, their examples are highly confined. In fact, physics cannot have run amok. If time travel were a commonplace, then our world would be cluttered with future junk, occurrences à propos of nothing that are there only because future people put them there. (For anybody who knows what a cargo cult is, cf. discarded flash cubes.) But there isn’t any future junk anywhere. (Unless you think that there is exactly one piece of future junk, the entire universe.) > http://www.henryflynt.org/