Technologies of the Monstrous: Notes on the Daniels’s <i>Monster</i> Trilogy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his foreword to the second edition of House. Humans, the first in a trilogy of plays1 that he created with Daniel Brooks, Daniel MacIvor likens the text to “night-time story-telling around the fire” (9). His comparison is useful for a number of reasons. First, it suggests the dramaturgical strategy that unites the plays of this trilogy, one that requires a single actor to narrate stories, recollections, fantasies, and dreams by performing multiple roles in complex patterns and plots. Second, it indicates the instrument crucial to the production of these narratives, namely sound – which, in this instance, includes not only the actor’s voice but, as well, the scoring of acoustic effects and original music. Third, the comparison implies how the plays’ elaborate soundscapes couple with innovative lighting design to heighten the audience’s imaginative response – an effect similarly stimulated by storytelling in firelight. Consistently, the plays in this trilogy force the audience to focus on the performer’s voice, in a space where lights variously illuminate actor, stage and house in unconventional ways. The performer, by manipulating his voice to represent the changes in age, sex, class and ethnicity that the plays’ numerous characters depict, both foregrounds vocal properties and complements the theatricality of the lighting, a technique that becomes especially obvious when Daniel Brooks distorts the voice by using audio technology. In here lies henry, the second play in the trilogy, MacIvor (who, thus far, is the only actor to perform the shows professionally) “wore a lavalier microphone through which the sound operator effected [sic] Daniel’s voice. In the script these effects are noted as VOICE, and the effected [sic] lines are underlined” (6). While the script for Monster, the final play in the trilogy, omits mention of this technique, in performance it uses a microphone with deliberate emphasis and greater effect. The actor delivers his opening speech in darkness, for example, with considerable amplification. At the end of this speech, as lighting slowly illuminates the performer at centre stage, he recites, And from the darkness … And from the darkness … And from the darkness come … I. (9)
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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 | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".