Earwitnessing the Queer Acoustics of Public Space: Law, Sex and Nature in Ultra-red’s Second Nature
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines queer sex and public space usage in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park through a series of recordings produced by the sound collective Ultra-red. Ultra-red have been using sound as a mode of political analysis since 1994 when they were founded by two AIDS activists in Los Angeles. This paper works in particular with two records released by Ultra-red in the late 1990s: an EP Ode to Johnny Rio (1998) and album Second Nature: An Electroacoustic Pastoral (1999), which are often referred to collectively as the Second Nature. For the Second Nature project, they draw their sound material from the public and private soundscapes of everyday queer life and cruising in Griffith Park. Ultra-red’s compositions rely on looping, fragmentation, and a radical approach to cutting audio. This disrupts both the musicality and linearity we might expect from recordings that present themselves almost as documentaries that pits queer behaviors, bodies, and identities against the suburban conceits of those who call for laws that curb the behavior in the park through policing, entrapment, barring traffic, and issuing tickets to gay men for loitering and sexual behavior.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it