The Labyrinth as immersive multimedia environment: Marshall McLuhan at Expo 67
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the Labyrinth, a multi-screen pavilion created by the National Film Board of Canada for the Montréal World Exposition in 1967. Within the Labyrinth, audiences were corralled through three chambers, each containing immersive multimedia environments that were designed to represent the chapters of an essential human life. The National Film Board envisaged the Labyrinth as a ‘new kind of instrument for communication […] created by the marriage of two ordinarily unrelated fields — the art of cinema and the art of architecture’. The purpose of this article is to evaluate the exact nature of this marriage of mediums. We will specifically focus on assessing the ways by which architectural space curated the phenomenological and epistemological relation that the audience had with the cinematic presentations in each chamber. Based on archival and primary sources, our research traces the design development of the Labyrinth and interprets its significance by employing Marshall McLuhan’s concepts of visual and acoustic space. As such, the article demonstrates how the Labyrinth modulated the balance between meaningful and affective modes of communication within its telling of the human story.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".