Italian Futurism and the Explosive ‘Now’

This chapter examines the development and changing artistic and socio-political implications of a particular temporal modality—‘the present as history’—within a variety of Futurist texts. It draws on the work of Frederic Jameson to argue that the Italian Futurists sought to radically disrupt a particular representation of the present in their calls to destroy the past and attempts to endow futurity with the urgency of fully embodied agency. Wittman argues that the Futurists reject a specific, historicist, bourgeois understanding of history and seek to inaugurate a new sense of time, an explosive ‘now’. Comparing early and later texts by Marinetti and other Futurists, and identifying their debts to anarchist thought, the chapter demonstrates that their strategy of breaking into the present can only counter totalitarian appropriations if it remains anchored in embodied practices.

Design and Evaluation of a Multimodal Representation for Conveying the Vast Range of Imperceptible Smallness

Teaching and learning the vast range of the sizes that are too small to see (called imperceptible sizes) has been a challenging topic, and a need for a novel form of representation that may provide learners with an alternative way of perceiving and conceptualizing imperceptible sizes emerged. From this, the author introduces a multimodal representation called Temporal-Aural-Visual Representation (TAVR). Unlike commonly used conventional representations (e.g., visual representation), TAVR employs a temporal modality as the main vehicle for conveying imperceptible sizes. In this chapter, the author elaborates on the design process and the details of TAVR. Informed by cognitive psychology research, the mental model and the challenges for learners in understanding imperceptible sizes were identified to form the design requirements of TAVR. Following the design and implementation, the evaluation of TAVR aimed to assess the changes in the participating students’ mental model of the range of imperceptible sizes, which showed TAVR’s positive impact on student learning.

Essential, Mandatory, and Shared Parts in Conceptual Data Models

This chapter focuses on formally representing life cycle semantics of part-whole relations in conceptual data models by utilizing the temporal modality. The authors approach this by resorting to the temporal conceptual data modeling language ERVT and extend it with the novel notion of status relations. This enables a precise axiomatization of the constraints for essential parts and wholes compared to mandatory parts and wholes, as well as introduction of temporally suspended part-whole relations. To facilitate usage in the conceptual stage, a set of closed questions and decision diagram are proposed. The longterm objectives are to ascertain which type of shareability and which lifetime aspects are possible for part-whole relations, investigate the formal semantics for sharability, and how to model these kind of differences in conceptual data models.

CONTEXTUAL LOGIC WITH MODALITIES FOR TIME AND SPACE

We develop a formal apparatus to be used as a tool in analyzing common kinds of context dependence in natural language, and their interaction with temporal and spatial modalities. It is based on context-operators, which act on wffs. The interplay between the various modalities and the context-operators is one of the main targets of the analysis. Statements made by different people at different times in different places, using the same personal temporal and spatial indexicals, can be represented in the system, and can be combined by sentential connectives and be subject to quantification. The use of spatial modality and the suggested treatment of adverbial phrases are new as far as we know. So is a certain variant of temporal modality. In the nontechnical part, consisting of Sections 1 and 2, we discuss the role that formalisms can, in principle, play in the analysis of linguistic usage; this is followed by a philosophical discussion of various kinds of context dependence. The semitechnical part, Section 3, introduces the system's components, the context, and the modal operators, and explains their use via natural language examples. In Section 4 the formal language and its semantics are defined, in full detail. The temporal and spatial sublanguages constitute separate sorts, which interact through the modal operators and the context-operators. A sound deductive system is given and a completeness result is stated, without proof.

Ruminations on Time (2005–2009)

Because the apocalypse did not occur, but the time of linear progress did come to a crashing halt. Because the post-modern rumours of utter temporal fragmentation seem quite silly. Because although we are very good at wearing watches, are positively wedded to our diaries, even so we seem to be suffering from a peculiar kind of temporal drift. Hhhmmm. If each era is both burdened and held loosely together by one temporal modality that figures most strongly in the cultural imagination, what happens when that temporality collapses?