Temporal Planes Research Articles

Digital activism in the future past: How Dutch Extinction Rebellion activists connect past, present and future in their memory work on Instagram

This article investigates the ways in which Dutch Extinction Rebellion activists discursively engage with the past, present and future on Instagram and leverage the platform’s affordances for mnemonic purposes. We argue that Extinction Rebellion activists, in their communication on the platform, connect these temporal planes retrospectively and prospectively. First, Extinction Rebellion activists use the past as a resource for present action aimed at producing lasting change. This relates to cultural reservoirs and repertoires of past injustices. Second, the present is perceived by Extinction Rebellion activists as a concern for future memory. The recording and documenting of climate injustices and the actions of the movement itself are examples of this. Both positive and negative imagined futures are used by Extinction Rebellion activists to legitimise and delegitimise past and present (in)action. In other words, Extinction Rebellion activists’ future imaginaries not just shape present action, but also shape their memory work. Instagram’s affordances of archivability, connectivity and spreadability are used by Extinction Rebellion to support their digital memory work. These socio-technical affordances are thus appropriated as mnemonic affordances for rhetorical and practical purposes. We support these claims through in-depth interviews with Extinction Rebellion activists and a thematic analysis of Instagram content shared by them.

Jacques Maritain, “Pure” Nature, and the State’s Teleological Crisis

In response to increased threats of totalitarianism in the twentieth century, Jacques Maritain proposed a separation of the spiritual and temporal planes which purported to limit the State’s power and resist the totalitarian and absolutist claims found in rising political movements. I argue, however, that the very distinction Maritain attempts to establish pushes the temporal plane into a teleological crisis which results in the totalitarianism Maritain sought to resist. By granting that temporal powers pursue ultimate ends autonomous from humanity’s absolute ultimate end, Maritain’s schema yields an unstable temporal plane which requires supernatural claims to make itself intelligible as an ultimate end. Whereas William Cavanaugh criticizes Maritain for mistakenly relying upon a scholastic understanding of “pure nature,” I propose that a recovery of Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of the openness of pure nature to supernatural ends can better justify Maritain’s proposed limited state and prevent the teleological instability at the root of Maritain’s political theory.

Border-Crossing Experience in Refugee Tales IV

The year 2021 witnessed the publication of the latest volume of Refugee Tales, which chronologically coincided with the seventieth anniversary of the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention by the UK and other countries. This collection is the fourth volume of the Refugee Tales Project, which began in 2015 with a yearly meeting to walk and share stories by victims of detention, with the main goal of abolishing indefinite detention in the UK. The Refugee Tales Project, which exposes the humanitarian crisis involved in displacement, refugeehood, and detention, is primarily a spatial project that is concerned with borders and boundary crossings. The centrality of space can be seen reflected in the stories collected in Refugee Tales IV, which also reveal a sustained interest in the dimension of time. In this context, the present study addresses borders and border-crossing in the literary voicing of migrants’ experience as these migrants interact with spatial and temporal planes, with the aim of exploring such an interaction in a selection of narratives from Refugee Tales IV. This analysis examines the selected tales from the perspectives of the treatment of space, time, and the disoriented perception of both, considering how the articulation of these parameters contributes to the exposure of the injustices in detention and refugeehood.

Моделирование воздействия акустической волны на мозг морского млекопитающего с учетом геометрии черепа

This work is aimed at developing a physico-mathematical model to describe the impact of acoustic waves on the marine mammal medulla, taking the skull geometry into account. Directed Green's functions are used as a mathematical apparatus. The skull of a dolphin is conventionally divided into a parietal, occipital, and two temporal planes. Wave penetration is considered taking into account different thicknesses of the cranial bones. The developed model can be used to analyze the behavior of acoustic waves in different areas of the brain. Directional patterns are constructed for the sound pressure of the emitter on the bone and medulla in the corresponding areas of a marine mammal head. In conclusion, an analysis of the results is carried out, and directions for further investigations are outlined.

South African managers self-regulating their after-hours smartphone usage: a revised perspective of work-family border theory

ABSTRACT In a prior quantitative study, we found that South African managers could be categorised into three different border-keeper groups to integrate or segment their work and home domains when receiving after-hours communications through their smartphone from work. In this study we investigated how these three groups of border-expanders, border-adapters, and border-enforcers regulated their after-hours smartphone usage for work purposes in the home environment. We employed a reflexive thematic analysis of 27 in-depth interviews (20 smartphone users and 7 of their partners). This work updates Clark’s Work-Family border theory to include border concepts in the context of smartphone technology. The border-keeper groups were found to differ in how they used the physical, psychological, and temporal planes to integrate and/or segment their work and home domains. Moreover, this was also attributed to the way in which each group determines the importance and/or urgency of each communication and therefore the development of self-regulatory patterns in how they operationalise the facilitation of after-hours work communications.

The Buried Promise of Sections 74 and 75 of Chapter V of Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) in light of New Testament Christianity

This article will offer a close reading of sections 74 and 75 of “Chapter V: Temporality and Historicality” of Division Two of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Our goal is to expand on a speculative metaphysical reconstruction of Chapter 17 of the Gospel of John, when Jesus is finished speaking to the disciples and is addressing the Father alone. This is right before his Passion, namely the arrest, trial, crucifixion, and ultimate Resurrection. The work is not situated in either abstract systematic or biblical theology, which seeks to defend faith, particularly using modern continental philosophical resources, such as the early Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Then again, it is not a philosophy of religion either, in the sense that it is not concerned with investigating the nature or essence of religion. Rather, it is trying to move within Being and Time to construct anew its ‘missing Division Three’ by creating new terms and distinctions beyond what is offered in the first Two Divisions. Our hypothesis is this: the supersession of Being and Time requires an imaginative metaphysical expansion of hidden secrets buried in the Gospel regarding a strange double temporalization in the discourse of Jesus to his Father. These two temporal planes are phenomenologically irreducible to either the linear sequence of events of his life as narrated in the four Gospels; or the history of theological attempts, particularly twentieth-century theological giants (Barth, Tillich, Rahner, Moltmann, Pannenberg), to think about the time-eternity-history relation with regard to the Kairos (through the Incarnation of the Son) at the fulfilled time and the Parousia, namely the Second Coming at the eschatological end of time. The article concludes with certain criteria regarding judgements on the undecidability of theism vs. atheism when attempting to go beyond Heidegger’s Being and Time. The ontological consequences, and therefore meaning of such an undertaking at a step beyond Being and Time, remain indiscernible for specific reasons.

Adichie’s Americanah, Transnational Border and the Prospects for Identity Reformation

ABSTRACT The re-shaping of borders, triggered by globalization and many other trans-border historical events such as the fall of the Soviet Union, increase in connective technology, cyberspace interaction and global health challenges informed the growing multidisciplinary scholarship on borders that brought about the reassessment of the notion of border as more than physical demarcation. In the literary discipline, for instance, the re-imagining of border is called border poetics. Border poetics involves a critical analysis of the processes of bordering at the topographical, epistemological, symbolic, textual and temporal planes. It examines identity negotiation at the intersection of socially defined territories and foregrounds movements within and across territories in (and of) the literary text. Using the theoretical framework of border poetics, therefore, I examine Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah as a transnational and a border narrative. By tracing the trajectory of racial border crossing, dwelling, and return by the migrant characters, I argue that Americanah involves multiple forms of bordering and border crossing. I also contend that racism is a barrier, similar to the actual border, that both separates and calls the migrant into constant mutation and negotiation of spaces.

ON THE NARRATIVE METHODS AND HUMANISTC SPIRITS OF CHINGIZ AYTMATOV’S THE DAY LASTS MORE THAN A HUNDRED YEARS

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years is a novel written by the great Kirghiz writer, Chingiz Aytmatov. In this novel, the writer adopted a stream-of-consciousness method of narrative, containing three temporal planes: the past, the present and the future in just one single day, as its name suggests. Through a parallel and fragmented narrative, Chingiz Aytmatov explored the theme of memory, humanity and the dictation of mainstream power over individual freedom.

Narrativization of dramatic statements in the plays of Oleg Bogayev

The purpose of this work is, first of all, the analysis of different forms of narration in the comedy works of Oleg Bogaev. Among them, we have selected those plays that differ in a special way of organizing the narrative: Lermontov of our time, Dead Ears and Gray. The article emphasizes that although the phenomena of epization and narrativization are closely interrelated, they must be distinguished. While epization is associated with the process of creating a picture of the world and with generic transformation, the phenomenon of narrativization should be attributed to the way of presenting reality and self-presentation of the author. The conclusions explain that in modern Russian drama, the process of narrativization of a dramatic statement is primarily due to the manifestation in the poetics of the text of an epic view of the world and the view of the narrator himself. Thanks to his omniscient position, it is possible to distinguish two temporal planes in the poetics of action: the time of narration and the time of the action depicted in the play. The processes of the utterance narrativization in the analyzed plays undoubtedly broaden the spectrum of an objective view of the events presented, first of all, the events of the characters telling.

Considering Afrofuturism and the Built Environment

As Angela Pastorelli-Sosa demonstrates in her essay on artist Sydney Cain in this volume, Afrofuturism centers Blackness and Black experiences while sharpening the contours of our imaginations by bridging different temporal planes. Pastorelli-Sosa indicates that Afrofuturism is a powerful tool for an artist’s imagination, and is used to wade into the possibilities of multiple futures and pasts. She artfully demonstrates this feature of Afrofuturism by highlighting how Cain’s spiritual labor allows for new experiences and engagements with the present and the past. Through the process of material extraction, Cain’s drawings become a channel for ancestral intervention. They pull an “invisibilized” people from the past, allowing them to surface in a present landscape, thereby altering our understanding and relationship with space and time.

Mythologizing History in Buryat Shamanic Rites

This study explores the regional specificity of Buryat rites with regard to the variable manifestation of mythological and historical components, and late innovations. The first attempt is made to reconstruct the mythological component of spoken texts accompanying these rites in the historical and ethno-cultural context. On the basis of field and archival data, contamination and transformation of myth and history in ritual is demonstrated. The principal characters such as deities, shamans, tribal and clan chiefs are described, and the semantics and pragmatics of ancestor and master- spirits in the historical context are discussed. The mythological status of supernatural characters of the rite is assessed. Specific ethnic criteria of turning real personalities into mythological characters in the historic context are listed. Universal features traceable in the process of turning history into myth include a regular mixture of mythological motifs with historical facts, interchange of temporal planes, and especially the reincarnation theme. The conclusion is made that pragmatic rites are the most stable, whereas the general tendency is that rites become less and less connected with mythology and progressively less hyperbolic.

Human action recognition using three orthogonal planes with unsupervised deep convolutional neural network

Deep learning models have attained great success for an extensive range of computer vision applications including image and video classification. However, the complex architecture of the most recently developed networks imposes certain memory and computational resource limitations, especially for human action recognition applications. Unsupervised deep convolutional neural networks such as PCANet can alleviate these limitations and hence significantly reduce the computational complexity of the whole recognition system. In this work, instead of using 3D convolutional neural network architecture to learn temporal features of video actions, the unsupervised convolutional PCANet model is extended into (PCANet-TOP) which effectively learn spatiotemporal features from Three Orthogonal Planes (TOP). For each video sequence, spatial frames (XY) and temporal planes (XT and YT) are utilized to train three different PCANet models. Then, the learned features are fused after reducing their dimensionality using whitening PCA to obtain spatiotemporal feature representation of the action video. Finally, Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is applied for action classification process. The proposed method is evaluated on four benchmarks and well-known datasets, namely, Weizmann, KTH, UCF Sports, and YouTube action datasets. The recognition results show that the proposed PCANet-TOP provides discriminative and complementary features using three orthogonal planes and able to achieve promising and comparable results with state-of-the-art methods.

Girl with the Sak Yon Tattoo

ABSTRACT Sophia Sok, a Cambodian American college student, unexpectedly finds herself bizarrely entangled with Audrey Fischer after getting paired together for a class project. Through a series of strange events and a sak yon tattoo, Audrey gets a superficial glimpse of the Sok family’s lives and how it reflects her own place of privilege. Novels about or by Cambodians tend to focus on the genocide and survivors’ memoirs. While these are necessary, there is a lack of alternative narratives to their experiences. Thus, this short story seeks to write in a different genre to convey the humanness of the refugee experience that is not only of trauma, but also one that reveals the complexity of intergenerational relationships, and is filled with humor, healing, and life. This story also delves into ideas of cultural voyeurism, fetishisms, and appropriation. Writing this short fictional story gave me the opportunity to weave Cambodian cultural traditions and stories across spatial and temporal planes in order to reorganize narratives about the Cambodian American identity. Contributing to the collective efforts of second and third generation Cambodian Americans to bring forth generational kinship and a new reality for ourselves, it opposes the portrayal of victimhood brought forth by a history of US settler colonialism and militarism.

Cultural memory and its influence on jewelry design - a case study

This work intends to demonstrate the importance of cultural memory, rescuing what was left to us as a historical and cultural legacy by our ancestors. In this approach, the proposal is to build a jewel as a case study, in order to disseminate and value the influence of Japanese culture, with a millenary heritage of a people who worship their ancestors and who value craftsmanship and manual techniques. In view of this proposal, it is intended to discuss these relations between jewelry design and Japanese culture, to establish a cross between memory, history and cultural symbols, an articulation between tradition and contemporaneity. Jewelry as a vehicle for a place full of memories that connects cultures in time and space. It will be presented as references the work of jewelry designers Kazumi Nagano, known for her work in gold threads, paper and fabrics, and Kazuko Nishibayashi with structured jewelry, yet transmitting lightness and fluidity. In addition as a case study, and in dialogue with the proposed discussion, I will present the jewels that I have been developing starting from my oriental roots and my training as an architect, seeking to balance the jewels structured with the same concepts that are applied in architecture as per example form and function, textures and full and voids as well as the importance of Japanese cultural heritage, such as origami and shibori, an ancient technique of manual dyeing creating patterns in the fabric that consists of sewing, folding, tying or attaching the fabric to dip in tincture. It is understood that since the most remote times, jewelry is a form of communication, capable of expressing different cultures and the group belonging to it, jewelry has values attributed by each person and is recognized at different times and different peoples. However, the concept of jewelry in Japan differs from that of theWest, probably due to the secular conception of fashion. It was not common to use necklaces, bracelets, rings and earrings in traditional clothing, being in charge of the use only by men and women of the nobility. In the rescue of Japanese cultural memory, the concept of what is or is not a jewel is manual work, the raw piece transformed into art and not its expensive raw material. Such memories of an ancient tradition make it possible to recover and rescue fragments that remain in memory that occupy a place in space. This cultural memory can be enhanced as it becomes “raw material” in jewelrydesign, rescuing ancestry keeping it in the present, an eternal return of these memories. It is the materialization of only a very tenuous part of a cultural heritage acquired from our past, manifesting itself as a trend, but in constant change. Therefore, in this theoretical-practical work, jewels reflecting ancient Japanese art will be presented as an inheritance for a contemporary world and as theoretical reflections such as Bergson, Deleuze and Nora clarify questions about memory as multiplicity, and how it articulates in the temporal planes evidencing cultural values of a place.

“Unicul Lucru Capabil Să Surprindă Un Crâmpei De VeȘnicie, Este Arta” Forestiera Feltrinelli, De Joachim Wittstock, Traducere De Maria Sass

Abstract Joachim Wittstock’s novella Forestiera Feltrinelli, translated into Romanian by Maria Sass, appeared under the aegis of the Honterus publishing house in Sibiu, in 2019. Combining present-day economic realities, with a parallelism of temporal planes, and the antonimy between the mythical past and the disillusioning present, Wittstock manages to interweave in his most recent volume social and historical analyses, love stories and subtle eroticism, existentialist concerns and political dimensions. The volume can be regarded as an important contribution to a better relationing of the Romanian readership with German literature in Romania, and to a better understanding of the complex thematic and narrative mechanisms in Joachim Wittstock’s works. A fascinating page of the history of Sibiu, of the Romanian Saxons, and of the author’s biography, the volume is a succesful and innovative attempt in the landscape of contemporary Romanian and European literature, and its Romanian translation a welcome and necessary initiative in view of a multicultural understanding of the literatures of ethnic minorities in Romania.

Faceless identification based on temporal strips

This paper first presents a novel approach for modelling facial features, Local Directional Texture (LDT), which exploits the unique directional information in image textures for the problem of face recognition. A variant of LDT with privacy-preserving temporal strips (TS) is then considered to achieve faceless recognition with a higher degree of privacy while maintaining high accuracy. The TS uses two strips of pixel blocks from the temporal planes, XT and YT, for face recognition. By removing the reliance on spatial context (i.e., XY plane) for this task, the proposed method withholds facial appearance information from public view, where only one-dimensional temporal information that varies across time are extracted for recognition. Thus, privacy is assured, yet without impeding the facial recognition task which is vital for many security applications such as street surveillance and perimeter access control. To validate the reliability of the proposed method, experiments were carried out using the Honda/UCSD, CK+, CAS(ME)2 and CASME II databases. The proposed method achieved a recognition rate of 98.26% in the standard video-based face recognition database, Honda/UCSD. It also offers a 81.92% reduction in the dimension length required for storing the extracted features, in contrast to the conventional LBP-TOP.

Coarticolazione temporale nelle combinazioni di gesti e parole: dati longitudinali in bambini nati a termine e pretermine nei primi due anni di età

Il presente lavoro esplora i legami temporali negli enunciati costituiti da 1 gesto e 1 parola durante il primo sviluppo comunicativo-linguistico, distinguendo tra combinazioni sin-crone e asincrone. Si analizza la produzione spontanea di 10 bambini singoli nati a termine e 2 pretermine, senza danno neurologico, osservati longitudinalmente nei primi due anni di età mediante videoregistrazioni delle interazioni a casa con la mamma, a cadenza mensile-bimensile tra 10-12 e 23-25 mesi, in accordo con la metodologia standard utilizzata negli studi sulla raccolta ed analisi delle produzioni spontanee. I risultati evidenziano che i bam-bini a termine con sviluppo tipico utilizzano un numero maggiore di combinazioni cross-modali sincrone, rispetto a quelle asincrone fin dalle prime fasi di sviluppo e in tutto il periodo osservato, dimostrando una precoce capacità di coarticolazione, sia semantica che temporale. Di contro, i bambini pretermine evidenziano una iniziale prevalenza di combina-zioni asincrone, rispetto a quelle sincrone, con un incremento successivo delle combinazioni sincrone durante il periodo osservato. Questo pattern evolutivo sembra più evidente nel bambino pretermine con più bassa età gestazionale (più prematuro). L'uso maggiore delle combinazioni asincrone su quelle sincrone, durante il secondo anno di età, potrebbe essere espressione di una condizione di rischio e di vulnerabilità che si esprime sia sul piano comunicativo-linguistico che socio-cognitivo tra i bambini pretermine senza danno neurologico nelle prime fasi di sviluppo. Considerando l'importanza del ruolo predittivo delle combinazioni di un gesto e una parola per le prime acquisizioni verbali, l'uso di una "multimo-dalità" poco coordinata sul piano temporale, durante il secondo anno di vita, potrebbe influire sui successivi processi di acquisizione. Tale dato rappresenta una conferma rispetto all'evidenza di profili di sviluppo disarmonici tra i bambini pretermine fin dalle prime ac-quisizioni.

Privacy-preserving facial recognition based on temporal features

This paper proposes a novel approach for privacy-preserving facial recognition based on the new feature computation technique: Local Binary Pattern from Temporal Planes (LBP-TP) that extracts information from only the XT or YT planes of a video sequence; in contrast to previous work that depend significantly on spatial information within the video frames. To our knowledge, this is the first known facial recognition work that does not rely on the spatial plane, nor that requires processing a facial input. The removal of this spatial reliance therefore withholds the facial appearance information from public view, where only one-dimensional spatial information that varies across time are extracted for recognition. Privacy is thus assured, yet without impeding the facial recognition task which is vital for many security applications such as street surveillance and perimeter access control. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method achieves accuracy of 99.56%, 98.19% and 100% for the recent CASME II, CAS(ME)2 and Honda/UCSD databases respectively. In addition, a 66% reduction in the number of bytes required for storage and recognition was also observed from these experiments. The outcomes of this research demonstrate that privacy in face recognition can be preserved, without compromising its security (i.e., recognition accuracy) and efficiency.

Alban Berg’s Lulu as a Foucauldian Heterotopia

Michel Foucault described the present epoch as being one of space. Some of his notions of space are found in his theories on heterotopias—disturbing places of segregated otherness—which Foucault adapted to describe temporal paradigms within a social framework. This study analyzes the duality of opposing temporal planes that are presented as the empirical world and the metaphysical realm, as they inform the heterotopic space within Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. The objective is to expand on the ambiguous meaning of heterotopia and to view Berg’s opera through the seminal lens of Foucauldian theory.

What is ‘virtual Holocaust memory’?

As more Holocaust memorial and educational organizations engage with digital technologies, the notion of virtual Holocaust memory has come to the fore. However, while this term is generally used simply to describe digital projects, this paper seeks to re-evaluate the specificity of virtuality and its relationship to memory through the thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson in order to consider how both digital and non-digital memory projects related to the Holocaust might be described as drawing attention to the virtuality of memory because they bring us into critical interstitial spaces between multiple layers of pasts and present in embodied ways that encourage us to consciously recognize the movements towards temporal planes which characterize memory. After reviewing the philosophies of Deleuze and Bergson in light of collaborative Holocaust memory, this article considers a range of digital and physical memorials to assess where we might find examples of virtual Holocaust memory today. I propose that we should see the virtual as a methodology – a particular form of memory practice – rather than a medium.