The point of these techniques is that they allow research on temporality, on the nature of time. In standard video playback, time is identical to time as we live it. In the techniques described above, something is revealed about time: we gain a new perspective on events, wherein beginning, middle, and end are seen simultaneously. When ordinary time is removed from an event, extraordinary things are revealed. A single event can have any of an infinite number of manifestations depending on the time-angle it is viewed from.

Collectively, these time-perspectives can be called “the atemporal”. Atemporality is a reality, not an illusion. We cannot see the atemporal in life because we are bound by time. These techniques provide views of atemporality.

How to explain the significance of the desire to come to a new understanding of time? It could be an intellectual project, an epistimological inquiry into the nature of our knowledge of the world. Alternately, it could be an emotional response to the universal experience of powerlessness before the inevitability of loss and mortality.