The aesthetics of trespass : the art and practice of urban exploration in the postmodern metropolis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Urban exploration (UE) seeks to discover, explore and document the hidden, abandoned and restricted sites in the postmodern metropolis that the majority of urban citizens never see. Urban explorers take as their mission the infiltration of sites such as abandoned factories, closed asylums, drainage systems, old subway tunnels, catacombs, and other facets of the urban landscape. Members of the UE community maintain a stringent code of ethics that aims to change nothing and leave no traces in the sites they visit. Urban explorers do not forcibly enter sites, vandalize, cause damage or remove objects during the course of their explorations. While recent mainstream media and popular culture representations of urban exploration have focused on the practice as a form of adrenalinebased "extreme sport", this work seeks to highlight the overlooked and highly sophisticated ways in which proponents of UE reimagine the city. In a landscape littered with the broken remnants of the industrial era, urban explorers are often the only ones to investigate the ruins of (post)modernity with a sense of respect and awe. Their photographs, art and written representations of their travel through the ruined landscape serve as aide-memoires and lasting documents of the places left to decay in the shadow of North American and Western European consumer culture. I argue that urban explorers act as postmodern artist-intellectuals in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and Georg Simmel, two sociologists who I consider to be urban explorers avant la lettre. I use the themes of fliinerie, urban archaeology and bricolage to discuss how the acts of observing, documenting and creating undertaken by urban explorers constitute an alternative mode of perception and way of knowing the postmodern metropolis.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 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".