The Stickiness of Instagram: Digital Labor and Postslavery Legacies in Kara Walker's “A Subtlety”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Walker's "A Subtlety, or The Marvelous Sugar Baby" existed as a temporary, site-specific installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn, New York (Figure 1).A maximalist sculpture of polystyrene foam coated in thirty tons of bleached white sugar donated by the Domino Sugar Corporation, standing thirty-five feet tall, stretching seventyfive long, and featuring a face resembling the artist's own, Walker's sphinx-shaped nude was sexualized in ways that evoked "Hottentot," "Jezebel," and "mammy" stereotypes.It symbolized the slave system and the sugar industry's massive appropriation and mystification of black women's labor, including but not limited to sexual, domestic, and caring labor.While Walker's sugar sphinx has been extensively photographed and written about, equally significant were the fifteen fivefoot tall figures of laboring boys-some made of molasses and resin, others of hard candy-who surrounded her, carrying baskets and field produce.In another ugly image of exploited labor, their decomposition in the heat led Walker to heap up the broken bits of their bodies in the baskets of the few boys who continued to stand (Figure 2)."A Subtlety" thus offered a dazzling iconography of the ongoing legacies of the slavery economy and the continuing effacement-the whitewashing-of its brutality.This article explores and assesses the pivotal roles of self-inscription, mediation, and audience participation for Walker's project.I focus on the popularity and impact of the hashtag #karawalkerdomino, which saw six thousand user-generated images posted on social media platforms (primarily on Instagram but also on Twitter and Facebook) during the first two days of the exhibition (Ovation Staff)-a number that
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".