The Ambivalent Translator: <i>Freeplay in Janice Gurney’s Punctuation in Translation</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the artwork of Toronto-based artist Janice Gurney, focusing on her use of text and punctuation in her artwork; her work is specifically examined in relation to Derrida’s notion of freeplay. Focusing on artists who are part of Gurney’s social network, I trace a brief history of the use of text and textual elements within contemporary Canadian art, connecting this history to Gurney’s use of text as an ambivalent act of historical translation. The focus of this text is an examination of Gurney’s use of punctuation from The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in her new series of paintings titled Punctuation in Translation. Each of Gurney’s paintings represent a single translation of Marcus Aurelius, in which only the punctuation is reproduced, eliminating the words and in this way she presents Aurelius not through the presence of his words in translation, but through their absence. Gurney revels in the never-ending Derridian freeplay of translation and contextualization that occurs with each and every reading of her artwork.
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 | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".