"The Universe Is a Quiet Catastrophe": Alan Glass's Late Assemblages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This article examines a selection of the assemblage artist Alan Glass's art made during the COVID-19 pandemic. In either direct or oblique ways, many of Glass's works from 2020 to 2022 allude to the pandemic and other ongoing crises including war and ecological catastrophe. Drawing on archival material and interviews with the artist, the article emphasizes the significance of poetry and esotericism for his art, and interprets the works under consideration as examples of gnosopoetics, or the pursuit of higher knowledge and radical transformation through surrealist art. After outlining Glass's trajectory from drawing and painting to the medium of assemblage and situating his art in the context of Surrealism in Canada, France, and Mexico, the author proceeds to a thematic discussion of Glass's pandemic-era works. These alternate between, on the one hand, depicting a broken world and thematizing death, and, on the other, calling forth possibilities of transformation through a surrealist poetics of the ascendant sign as well as imaginary forms of communication.
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 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 | 0.020 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".