Sascha Hommer’s <i>In China</i> (2016): masks, animals, learning and identity flux
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In China is a graphic travelogue. A travelogue usually describes the traveller’s reactions when interacting with the foreign country’s people, institutions and land-scape. These reactions are diverse according to multiple factors, but they all share a form of culture shock. In Education Abroad Studies, culture shock consists of distinct phases. However, Cultural Studies are more interested in the reaction towards the traveller’s foreign culture, which could take the form of antipathetic comments about the visited region for ideological reasons. As Edward Said shows, the reaction deeply depends on the power relation between the two countries. But as some of Said’s critics argue, some artists find ways to counter these orientalist clichés. Moreover, the culture shock has also recently changed because we live in an age of new technologies that could act as a catalyst of global social integration and cross-cultural transition. In our article, I show how Sascha Hommer’s alternative graphic travelogue uses challenging visual techniques (masks, anthropomorphic animals, visual epigraphs, dream episodes) to circumvent the (often negative) stereotyping of Chinese culture. By changing his mask twice (from a cat to a panda), Hommer visually displays how accepting the fact that identity is in flux facilitates a positive welcoming attitude.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 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".