At the Site of Wilderness: Meredith Monk’s <i>Facing North</i> (1990)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1990, American composer, vocalist, filmmaker and choreographer Meredith Monk became witness to the condition of wilderness while in residency at the Banff Centre in northern Alberta, Canada. The resulting work, Facing North, a collaboration with long-time associate composer Robert Een, grew out of the combined senses of physical and metaphysical isolation engendered by the remote mid-winter setting and Monk’s detachment from her normal, urban life. The piece (and accompanying tone poem later recorded and released in album form in 1992) portrays the interdependence of two people trying to come to terms with their simultaneous being and nonbeing, connection and disconnection, in what Monk perceived as an inimical northern landscape. In “Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness” (2000) Canadian cultural theorist Jonathan Bordo argues that artists and their paintings of wilderness arise “from the very idea of wilderness as positing and effacing a witness to an unwitnessible condition” (Bordo 2000: 228). Such depictions of wilderness, while representing a perceived denial or erasure of human presence, in fact require a witness to affirm the very condition of wilderness. In this paper I argue that in performing wilderness Monk engages in a similar process to the visual artists painting wilderness that Bordo examines. As part of an on-going research project entitled “Choreographing the North” this paper focuses on the rupture that is enacted when trying to represent absence through presence and how this relates to ideas of collecting and colonizing the North. In Facing North Monk performs the mythopoetic divide between cultured Self and untamed Other, realizing in the process that her presence in the wilderness, while resonant, is ultimately self-referential.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".