Bibliographic record
Abstract
The video essay Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) by artist Lawrence Lek is difficult to categorize. It is an hour-long film collaging documentaries, news clips, video games, and CGI. Most often exhibited and discussed in a (new) media arts context, it has been described as a pseudo-documentary, a manifesto, a conspiracy theory, science fiction, and “radical realism.” As an architect-by-training, musician, simulation artist, and now filmmaker, Lek himself is equally difficult to pin down. Given the artist’s formal training in a design discipline, it is curious that Sinofuturism has not yet been discussed by scholarship through the lens of design. This essay discusses Sinofuturism (1839–2046 AD) for the first time as a work of speculative design. First, I introduce the work and its creator. Next, I discuss its negative reception, laying the basis for my central argument that analyzing Sinofuturism as a work of speculative design might yield more fruitful insights and discussion. I then explore the emerging field of speculative and critical design (SCD) and its potential to critique and reimagine societal structures. Finally, I discuss the effectiveness of Sinofuturism as a work of speculative design and analyze its vision, whether it be utopian, dystopian, or something else.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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".