Harvesting Surfaces: Handcrafted Film at the Changing of the Centuries Introduction, Notes, Acknowledgements
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
I came late to the party. A few years ago, I begrudgingly burned a 16mm print of my digital movie Burning Contour Matrix to submit to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The financial blow was considerable for a three-minute piece, but the pre-screeners were kind enough to program it, and I made my way to the festival to experience several days of fiercely independent film. Secure in my place as a filmmaker, I settled into my seat in the Michigan Theater. Soon came that unmistakable feeling-the realization of how much larger the world is than you realized, and how very much you don't yet know. Film after film unreeled on that massive screen, affected in some fundamental way on the very surface of the strip of film itself. Processed by hand. Reticulated by heaveivknows-what... potassium perchlorate? Lipton Cup-a-Soup? Tints and tones. Scrapes and scratches. Woven into narratives, and standing on solid abstract ground. Where had I been? This wasn't a retrospective, these were all new films! I read the listservs and magazines that I thought applied to my little world, and there was nary a mention of this! Such is living is a so-called digital world... it can be quite binary at times. Here was an entire parallel world to mine that I knew absolutely nothing about. Through some detective work, I found out that many of the filmmakers I newly admired first learned to tread on the surfaces of film at a farm in rural Oiv tario, where Canadian filmmaker Philip Hoffman (What These Ashes Wanted, Kokoro Is For Heart) held summer workshops. Here filmmakers could come and learn about the apparently forgotten art of hand-processing motion picture film. If you look closely at some of the works on this disc, and others that could not fit in the limited space, you may see some shared locations collected from stays at the farm. A barn here, a field there. Treated very differently by each maker who approaches them, they become surfaces within surfaces... with added sentiment for those familiar with the places inscribed in the emulsion. I swear it wasn't the fumes, but there at the farm, in the dark, hunched over a plastic tub of dektol, my heart fully opened to these parallel, simultaneous existences-the Physical and the Digital. The result is this uniquely digital form that carries the likenesses of some recent works of handcrafted film. I am honored to be able to gather these filmmakers' works and these thinkers' analyses together in this format. For handcratted film aficionados, I hope this disc is a useful and enjoyable way to return to these five films for deeper study. For those coming to these forms tor the first time (or the first time in a long time), I hope this disc serves as a suitable entry into this world through these notable examples. …
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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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