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Record W4392236282 · doi:10.1080/17540763.2023.2272245

TREVOR PAGLEN’S BORDER ABSTRACTIONS IN THE AGE OF MACHINE VISION

2024· article· en· W4392236282 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Sarah Bassnett

Bibliographic record

VenuePhotographies · 2024
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicGeographies of human-animal interactions
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersWestern University
KeywordsPhotographyRepresentation (politics)AbstractionMeaning (existential)SensibilitySpace (punctuation)Field (mathematics)AestheticsWork (physics)Artificial intelligenceComputer scienceVisual artsArtEpistemologyPolitical scienceEngineeringLawPoliticsPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Over the past two decades, machine vision and artificial intelligence (AI) have become integrated into many aspects of daily life, and with machines generating images for other machines, humans are no longer at the centre of the image world. To explore the implications of the age of machine vision, this article focuses on a selection of work by American artist Trevor Paglen made between 2008 and 2018. It examines the significance of the US-Mexico border region as a site of his investigations and the role of abstraction in repositioning machine vision within the human-centred visual language of art. The article shows how Paglen’s body of work turns toward the nonhuman to consider what it means to make images when representation is no longer primarily a site for the construction of meaning by humans but is also a field of data for analysis by machines. It explores how Paglen conveys the interplay between different models of vision with an aesthetic sensibility that develops from the history of photography but signals the breakdown of representational photography. His work highlights the contested space of the US-Mexico border region as a key site in a surveillance infrastructure that depends on a new regime of vision and offers a space to reflect on what it means to live in a world where most images are now made by and for machines.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.599
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.022
GPT teacher head0.365
Teacher spread0.343 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2024
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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