The Permeable Border: Examining Responses to North American Integration in Video Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this essay, I suggest that artistic production provides valuable insights into the nature of the Canada-US border during the late-twentieth century when significant changes were occurring to dominant understandings of Canada in relation to North America. Focusing on the medium of video art, I trace the sustained engagement of Canadian contemporary artists to respond to and comment on the move towards continental integration through free trade. I contextualize my discussion in relation to trade developments that opened Canada’s border with the US, such as the 1989 implementation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement. This agreement, along with the later North American Free Trade Agreement, led to increasing continental integration at the end of the twentieth century, as well as hope for hemispheric integration with the subsequent negotiations towards the Free Trade Area of the Americas. With attention to works by Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak, Eva Manly, and Clive Robertson, I foreground cultural contributions to redefining the Canada-US borderlands. Here, I chart the artists’ intention to echo narratives of the border’s porousness and address the power dynamics between the Canadian state and its trade partners. Examining themes of cultural imperialism, colonialism, and national identity, I point to the importance of cultural production in assessing the borderlands and, more broadly, histories of free trade in North America.
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 | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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 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".