Bibliographic record
Abstract
tba Submission 
 
 Video Link
 
 https://vimeo.com/188828000
 
 Artist Statement
 
 As an artist I approach my practice as a conduit for imagining alternate political and personal realities in which the non-human animals are afforded relational and differentiated rights of membership in a multispecies community. The intention of such work is to stir the moral imagination of my viewer. By not simply raising indignation at abuse and neglect, not presenting (yet again) an image of the animal other as a passive victim, my purpose is to envision the animals we are entangled with as neighbours, friends and members of disparate communities.
 
 Speciation Dance is a new media installation work that challenges established relationships between human and nonhuman animals. It represents a progression in my attempts to abandon the presumptive act of speaking for the animal other. Rather, this work joins animal and human voices in hopes of decentering the anthropocentrism inherent in art making.
 
 Project Description:
 Speciation Dance
 
 A small but strategic desire exists within humanity to preserve certain charismatic animal species from extinction; this has led to a dance both epic and intimate, which paradoxically attempts to maintain natural wildness by crafting an elaborate system of interspecies dependency. This contradiction is most visible in the conservation of whooping cranes. This species has come to emblemize the extreme commitment humans have made to the management of creatures we ourselves have driven to near nonexistence. In the performative video work, Speciation Dance, I focus on slippages in identity for both human-surrogate-mates and animals in captive breeding programs. In these relationships scientists and conservation workers don cobbled together costumes and assume monastic vows of silence to prevent their charges from becoming too accustomed to humans. But perhaps more importantly, these orniphiles (bird lovers) encourage the crane to imprint upon their bird persona.
 
 When a creature imprints upon an individual outside of their species it disrupts speciation, the inbred impulse to be attracted only to one's own kind. Imprinting on a human distorts animal identity; seeing itself as human an animal will have no desire to copulate with its own species. As the performers in Speciation Dance transform into bird/people we hear ornithologist George Archibald describing his cross-species relationship with a crane named Tex. George and Tex’s story inspired this piece, and George’s narrative, assembled from found audio recordings, gives humor and context to the work. In this 6-minute two-channel video work, I am documenting two professional dancers from the Nova Dance Collective as they flirt with becoming-animal. Stepping into the role of a liminal being, neither human nor bird, they perform as humans-come-whooping cranes. Dipping, leaping, strutting and extending prosthetic heads to the sky, they attempt to relate to each other through the embodied language of both species. Trying to court and arouse one another, the performers convey the beautiful absurdity of such a futile act.
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".