Dirty, Pretty Trash: Confronting Perceptions through the Aesthetics of the Abject
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Both abjection and the return of the abject are crucial feedback. We send away what we don’t want, but the forced confrontation of the abject can have a transformative power when we actually perceive what is a part of us and not apart from us. Visual feedback serves as a potential “event” that can let us experience how our behaviors are problematic; in turn, this knowledge can result in potential for change. When the abject appears in the form of art, it becomes enframed for our scopic pleasure and itself becomes an object to observe and reflect upon: abject as object. When it comes to our encounters with the material world of nature and art, both are more than the picturesque or the sublime, but instead embody the cultural connections that we sometimes wish we could ignore and keep safely out of sight or at a distance. This is why confrontations with the aestheticized abject can serve as potential sites for encounter and possibly of transformation. Artist Mark Dion conceives of art as part of this transformation, asserting that one way to encourage care for the more-than-human world is through an “aesthetic sensibility.” It is this sensibility that Dion employs in his work to address environmental concerns. Rather than ruminate on the sublime or pastoral, Dion explores the frequently invisible urban ecologies that the vast majority of people encounter but frequently keep at a distance. Dion’s work explores what happens to trash and the othered animals that inhabit such trashscapes. By framing the aestheticized abject in the gallery, we grant our bodies the opportunity to perceive and not to simply to look away.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.064 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".