Mask Aesthetics: Prophylaxis, Post -Digital Arts, and Reimagining Vulnerable Selves
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Affirming masks’ proven efficacy in preventing the airborne transmission of COVID-19, this paper seeks to understand face covering during the pandemic from a different but complementary angle: that is, as a deeply relational and thoroughly multimodal practice. Drawing on concepts of automediality, crip and feminist theories of affect and embodiment, biopolitics, and pandemic temporalities, I analyze artists’ mask-themed projects created during the first two years of the pandemic across forms including sculpture, performance, digital photography, social media, online visual diaries, and mutual aid projects. Through theoretical, analytical, and self-reflexive writing, the discussion draws out the shifting, contingent meanings of masks; their relation to currents of power, affect, and memory; and their implications for selfhood, community, and solidarity. Artists’ automedial projects show how masks have become integral to the life of the body, the upheaval of our lives, the losses we are mourning, the overlapping injustices we must fight, and the stories we tell about what it was and is like to be in our situations and to be connected to one another during the pandemic.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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 it