Sentences on Christian Bk's Eunoia: writing after language writing, Oulipo and conceptual art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kenneth Goldsmith's recent recasting of Sol LeWitt's 1967 article Paragraphs on Conceptual Art as Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing flags a significant tendency in contemporary poetics. For Goldsmith, as for LeWitt, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. Much like the conceptual art of the 1960s, in which all planning and decisions were made beforehand and the execution was a perfunctory affair (LeWitt 1967: 5), a number of contemporary writers have attempted to eliminate the arbitrary, the capricious and the subjective from their texts. While it is true that early conceptualists frequently used language, the turn towards a more overt conceptual poetics in the North American context has occurred in the wake of language writing; this turn means that conceptual writing draws from the insights and practices of both literary and visual art discourse. My critical essay will consider conceptual poetics, with a special focus on the Canadian writer and performer Christian Bk, whose work offers readers a useful site for questioning the interrelationships of performance, concept and writing. Since the early 1990s Bk has produced sound performances, visual texts, artist's bookworks, pataphysical literary theory and formally innovative poetry. My discussion will also address wider questions about the intersection of post-language school poetics and the visual arts. Many of the writers published in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and related journals were keenly interested in the complex relationship among reading, reference and subjectivity, a relationship which they saw as having political as well as aesthetic consequences. To what extent does conceptual poetics continue this interest? What is the relationship between sonic performance and page-based writing? And finally, to what extent do the visual aspects of this work dialogue with its conceptual and sonic dimensions?
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".