New Media’s Presentness and the Question of History: Craigie Horsfield’s Broadway Installation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the last three decades, media art (in both its analogue and digital forms) has been consistently defended in its alleged ability to, in the words of art critic Jean-Christophe Royoux, to “give concrete form to what, as a rule, vanishes from cinematographic time: the present.” Questions emerge, however, as to what exactly constitutes the present and, more importantly—in works that privilege presentness—how can the past and the future can still be productive categories of time? Indeed, such a privileging might be more problematic than initially thought. This, at least, is what comes out from a study by historian François Hartog who maintains that the prevailing regime of historicity today is not liberating access to the present butpresentism: the turning of the present into an absolute value, whose absoluteness means a real disconnection from the past and the future. In such a regime, it is the possibility of history which is threatened with disappearance. This article seeks to examine the apparent incompatibility between new media art’s presentist inclination and the sense of history. To investigate this tension, it is imperative to look at artworks that address one of the main challenges of a culture obsessed with the present—the setting of the conditions of the possibility of history. I propose that Craigie Horsfield’s work is an original contribution to this line of investigation. Special attention is given here to the three main aesthetic strategies constitutive of the video installationBroadway(2006): the solicitation of attention, the temporalization of the horizon line and the convergence of two viewing positions—those of the spectator and the witness.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".