Bibliographic record
Abstract
I inhabit the microbial world. Microbes live on my body and inside my body. Every opening in my body envelope is populated by millions and millions of different microbes. I eat microbes, swallow microbes, digest microbes, and defecate microbes. When I kiss my wife, I share microbes with her. When I shake hands with my neighbor, we swap our microbes. We are both part of a complex network of microbes commonly referred to as the microbiome, which is an essential part of our individual and collective bodies. The composition of my microbiome fluctuates on a daily basis, according to my all my actions and encounters. Although my genome is fixed, my microbiome is changeable and adaptable. I can transform my microbiome as I wish to change my identity. As part of my artistic practice, I expose my own body to various types of experiments aimed at changing the makeup of my microbiome. I then use the tools of science to quantify the effects produced. On February 3, 2016, I shook hands with 1,001 people at the Berlin Transmediale, gradually transforming the invisible community of microbes living in the palm of my right hand. At regular intervals, assistants took samples of this skin microbiome to study how contact with others transforms who we are. Since then, I have repeated this hybrid project, at the interface of art and science, in Copenhagen, Montreal, Perth, San Francisco, Baltimore, and Paris. The performance of 1,001 handshakes raises awareness through physical engagement, through acts of participation and exchange at the social, individual, and microbial levels. As a scientist, the objective of this experiment was to collect scientific data on the human microbiome, the dynamics of contamination of my microbiome in contact with the microbiome of others. As a bioartist, it was more the notion of individuality that appealed to me, a philosophical concept that I formalize through microbiome self-portraits, or microbiome selfies generated from the DNA of bacteria harvested from the palm of my hand. Hidden beyond the visible, in the palm of a hand, as the most curious visitors zoom in, these microbiome selfies reveal themselves on a micro scale. Am I still the same after a thousand handshakes with strangers? These multicolored bacterial networks attest to my metamorphosis. This mundane action of the handshake comes to us today in a new light amidst a global pandemic exacerbated by social distancing. The limits of my body are not those of my skin. I touch therefore I am. I carry traces of your microscopic identity with me. I am a network of microbial cells that dance with my own cells to construct the person that I am in real time.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".