Art, Labour and Precarity in the Age of Veneer Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We are aware of recent contributions to an ongoing conversation about the politics of precarity that arise from the intensifying devaluation of the labour of cultural workers: Aruna D'Souza's Dying of Exposure, Yasmin Nair's Scabs: Academics and Others who Write for Free, and Barbara Ehrenreich's In America, only the rich can afford to write about poverty.Each of these authors comment on the increasing lack of job security and pay for their work as writers, and point out that only people with other income sources can really afford to write for free.A similar situation exists for other cultural workers, including artists such as ourselves.Our involvement in this discussion took a turn with an invitation to participate in Mayworks 3 Windsor in 2012, where we presented a performative relational video screening workshop called Homunculus: Occupy y/our life.We continued the conversation in 2013 with a subsequent work: Abundant Future: Interactive Performative Art Philosophy Embodied Value Debate Exchange.Both projects ran up against and tangled with labour, value, art, embodiment, academic politics, and our precarity as artists within a neoliberal economy.Artists have always lived in the land of Precaria.However, in the 1970's a generation of Canadian artists fought for and won respect for artist's work and recognition for the necessity to remunerate artist's labour.While this did not impact all of the art world, gains were achieved 1 Rebecca Garrett is a Toronto based artist whose community based video projects and experimental videos and installations have been exhibited and/or screened at numerous venues in Canada and abroad.Garrett's use of media is situation specific and she has worked collaboratively and/or collectively with a number of groups and individuals in Canada, USA, Zimbabwe and Kenya. 2 Liza Kim Jackson is a community artist and PhD candidate at York University in Environmental studies.She researches social praxis art as a method to resist and survive gentrification and broader issues of poverty, homelessness and violence under capitalist colonialism.3 Mayworks Festival of Working People and the Arts is a multi-disciplinary arts festival that celebrates working class culture."Founded in 1986 by the Labour Arts Media Committee of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council, Mayworks is Canada's largest and oldest labour arts festival."(Mayworks, n.d.).
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.049 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".