The Passion of the Digital: the Ontology of the Photographic Image in the Age of New Media
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using Mel Gibson’s 2004 film and cultural phenomenon The Passion of the Christ as a launching pad, this essay meditates on some questions about the twentieth century legacy of competing realisms, the graphic imperative of contemporary digital image cultures, and the ontological conundrums involving technology and mass media. Passion is an onto-theological filmic ‘event’ that derives equally from an almighty religiosity as well as a cultish process of being enraptured by certain ritual values of a new-age technologism of sound and image. This endographic writing out of the Gospel narrative at the level of the tissue and nerve of the committed viewer affirms a transcendental truth already there in an internal cosmos of belief instead of working in terms of an externally navigable ‘realist’ representation of the world that seeks to ‘bear away our faith’. This is rendered possible when unquestioning belief in Christ and in his momentous sacrifice is met by an embracing of technology without the skepticism of a scientific temper .
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it