A SCALE THAT EXCEEDS US: THE BP GULF SPILL FOOTAGE AND PHOTOGRAPHS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our fascination with the surveillance video of oil gushing from the British Petroleum Gulf Spill in 2010 expresses a paradox: our ultimate irrelevance to technological progress apparently undertaken for our benefit, in our name, and in response to our demand. These images present a visual model for all future disasters: here, something is happening but nothing is changing. This picture of disaster without progression and syntax has been witnessed before but only on stage, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame. Art has mustered only a weak rejoinder to the subdued shudder inspired by the BP video. Our fascination with the BP footage is echoed faintly in our response to Edward Burtynsky’s OIL. In his photographs of the petroleum industry, Burtynsky removes the human measuring stick, thereby triggering our sense of the enormity (both of the size and of the crime) of the petroleum industry. Yet unlike the BP video, these images recuperate our horror at the obscure scale of what they show us. Instead of recoiling from Burtynsky’s work, the viewer is placated through an appreciation for the artist’s control of his medium and its iconic language.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".