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Record W4407069996 · doi:10.5206/tba.v6i1.18818

Vibrant Things

2025· article· en· W4407069996 on OpenAlexaffvenue
Stephen E. Severn

Bibliographic record

Venuetba Journal of Art Media and Visual Culture · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicPosthumanist Ethics and Activism
Canadian institutionsOntario College of Art and Design
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSociology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

The root of the English word ‘object’ is a compound of the Latin prefix, ob, meaning in front of, and jacere, meaning to throw. This applies to the word both as a verb: to oppose, I object to [x], and as a noun: a “tangible thing, something perceived with or presented to the senses.”[1] In both cases, the definition of ‘object’ invokes a relationship between ourselves and the thing itself, in our sensing or perception of it. Perhaps because of this, it is easy to infer a human-centred definition in which the object is defined by our perception and exists for us; physical objects stop us, present obstacles for us to manoeuvre around, much like an objection: an argument presented in opposition. But what if objects are not obstacles, are not in opposition to us, are not primarily defined by our sensing or perception? My preference is for the latter half, the thrown-ness, jacere, of this etymology; objects present themselves to our senses, they throw (jacere) themselves in front of (ob) us. This definition accentuates an animacy in materiality, and an energetic lived relationality to all matter — if objects throw themselves in front of us, they arrive at us just as much as we arrive at them. Our senses are constantly being presented with objects, whether we register them or not. John, Virginia Woolf’s character in “Solid Objects,” is presented with objects (beach glass, broken porcelain, meteorite) that influence the course of his life. My visual art practice engages deeply with objects, and, like John, objects have influenced the course of my life. For this reason, object-theory resonates with me, as do stories like that of Woolf’s character for whom life is, in a sense, a series of object-relations. In this paper, I formulate a conceptual framework for an ontology of vibrant things to explore what I intrinsically already know: all matter is active, fluid, non-hierarchical, and in relation. I describe a shift where I theoretically and physically orientate myself to objects as vibrant things, speculate on how this orientation might be queer, and recount how these relations are registered in my art practice and research methodology through the process of casting. [1] “Object” Online Etymology Dictionary, accessed March 17, 2021, https://www.etymonline.com/word/object.

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 categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.830
Threshold uncertainty score0.264

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

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

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 head0.020
GPT teacher head0.352
Teacher spread0.332 · 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.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
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".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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