As Long as There Were Any Roads to Amnesia and Anaesthesia Still to be Explored: Contemporary Artistic Reflections on the Intertwined Memories of British Imperial History, Trees and Place
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article critically examines contemporary art installations by two British artists responding to two major memory sites of British imperial and national history: 1) Trafalgar Square, one of the biggest squares in central London, a former imperial crossroads, surrounded by Canada House and South Africa House and only steps away from Admiralty Arch, the former official residence of the First Sea Lord ; and 2) Tate Britain, a gallery dedicated to the showcasing of national art, named after, founded and funded by Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899), an English millionaire philanthropist whose wealth derived from the industry of sugar refinery. Seven ancient English oaks made up Anya Gallaccio’s as long as there were any roads to amnesia and anaesthesia still to be explored (2002), while Angela Palmer’s public work, Ghost Forest (2009), showcased ten giant exotic stumps imported from a former British colony, Ghana. Both installations exhibited the bodies of dead trees as their main physical, symbolic and ideological material to activate and reflect on the collective memory of the British Empire, whose expansion long relied on timber production, including for shipbuilding. Drawing from memory studies, postcolonial studies and ecocritical art history, the article probes the intertwining of the repressed memories of British imperial environmental history, trees and place in these two artworks which both stage collective mnemonic experiences articulating Britons’ conflicted relationships with their own past.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".