Morphing Bodies and Mechanicial Eyes: A Reassessment of the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
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
Photography’s unique ability to render visible what is ordinarily invisible lends it to scientific observation and artistic expression alike. Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues exploit this capacity of the photograph in their documentation of hysteria—work that is located at a blurry intersection between art and science. The photographs taken at the Salpêtrière women’s asylum in Paris, France, for their original publication in La Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1881), came to my attention through Georges Didi-Huberman’s book, the Invention of Hysteria (2003). They depict, through a clinical eye, patients that are mid-gesture, in the throes of hysterical fits. The hysteria documents exemplify an instance where the power of the performed gesture is focalized by doctors in the production of identities, and where the power of the photographic apparatus is deployed in the production of gestures. I intend to show how the body and its gestures might have been understood in the field of neuropsychiatry at the time these photographs were exposed, and then I will look at the means by which machines produce gestures with some degree of autonomy. Given a new understanding of the independent functions of imaging technologies, it will be possible to argue that there are some manners in which the technologies of representation actually participate in the production of bodies.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 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