Gardens of Artificial Delights: Residual Memories of the Digital in Contemporary Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tamiko Thiel’s Unexpected Growth (2018) and Clement Valla’s Surface Proxy (2015) utilize new media technologies such as augmented reality (AR) and image mapping/print processing to broadcast an image. Both are examples of new media that hone in on formal proximity and immersion at a digital medium-specificity. Incidentally, both also deal in cyber-botanical terrain: Thiel’s Unexpected Growth is an AR installation that presents an uncanny wilderness not exactly of this earth’s, but composed of its discarded waste products. Similarly, Clement Valla’s Surface Proxy reconstructs a third-dimensionality based on flat and two-dimensional renderings of natural objects like plants and stone, effectively making previously organic forms of life synthetic. Both artists utilize digital tools (embedded interfaces, transcription and digital rendering) to present a vitalist materiality that is uncannily nonorganic; instead of the complete, 1080p reproduction of the image, Thiel and Valla’s artworks employ visual queues that effectively splinter reality, emphasizing the loss intrinsic to digital conversion. Yet this materiality is both less than and more than human: these artworks think the relation between digital memory and its withdrawal through nonhuman botanical life. One does not find immediate remedies for the all too human problem of memory loss at the sites of Surface Proxy and Unexpected Growth. Instead, one finds half-rendered relics, overgrown weeds of memory and splintered representations of a future - not of ours, but of sedimentary and botanical life.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".