Since I was a child I've loved music, art and language. And now I return to the delight of the moment, improvising in these subjective spaces with sound, art, text, and design.
The purpose of my work is to discover and understand new vocabularies. The essential insight is simply that if we measure things by one and we have one hundred of something, then we have one hundred things. If on the other hand we measure things by one half of one, the same one hundred somethings becomes two hundred things and so on. Applied to sound for example this creates measurement beyond scales, and applied to the visual it creates depth beyond single-point perspective.
This concept is taking shape now in the form of an instrument combining software and hardware with musical, artistic and literary concepts. I sit at the piano keyboard or controller manipulating sounds, texts and images as if they were liquid. I perform spontaneously in real-time, making and being moved by the forms which emanate from my computer instrument. Each of these media sound, image, video and text take their own direction: and I am to them like a divining rod to water, moving as the energy dictates.
Combining the senses of touch, hearing, sight and balance with cognition and understanding, audience and performer(s) become intimately involved in the creation of the work, both as receivers and, by their presence, as direct contributors to it.
Through the use of projection, fixed and moving, the work breaks with notions of perspective. The photographic concept of blur creates instead a layering of infinite states of presence revealed only as needed. This for me is an essential aspect of design as an art form, and connects it clearly to the Futurist typography of Marinetti, the computer explorations of Muriel Cooper at MIT, and the phenomenology of Robert Irwin and James Turrell.
Robert Appleton
Notes: Appleton is a student at Ontario College of Art and Design and teaches at Ryerson University. This work is performed on a MacBook Pro using Korg Nano controllers and Max/MSP software developed by Miller Puckette at IRCAM in the mid-1980's. It uses the complete text of Fredric Jameson's essay Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1984 and the voice of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of The Tate Triennial, 2009.
His essay "About_Time: A theory of design, music and the play instinct" is being published as an insert to the book Tempus Fugit by Index Book, Belgium. He studied percussion with Tony Oxley in London and The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization with George Russell in New York. He's an elected member of Alliance Graphique Internationale.
About_Time © Robert Appleton 2009. All rights reserved.
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2:45Sketch for Performanceby bebopple480 views
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