Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis investigates the anxiety-filled artwork Poor Magic (2017) by the Montréal-based artist Jon Rafman, as presented at the National Gallery for the Sobey Art Award exhibition. Rather than understanding Rafman’s artwork within its contemporary artistic context, this thesis instead situates Poor Magic in a constellation of philosophical concepts and considerations. Interested in the intricate ramifications of the anxiety produced by the artwork, the thesis begins by unveiling the anxiety-inducing elusiveness of death and the equally anxiety producing uncontrollability of technology – not only in the way Rafman uses them, but in their ontological structures. The focus then shifts around the outcomes of Poor Magic. Read from the standpoint of presentism, Poor Magic has the capacity to rescue us into the emergency of short-termism, rather than from it – here relying on contemporary continental philosopher Santiago Zabala’s theory. By putting forth the shortcomings of presentism and of commonly used coping mechanisms, Poor Magic makes us question and face up to the temporal emergency we are currently in.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".