The sleep of reason produces monsters: Steven Shearer’s Profaned Travelers
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
In April 2021, Steven Shearer’s photographs were displayed on billboards along Vancouver’s Arbutus Greenway as part of the Capture Photography Festival. Sourced from his collection of found images, the works pictured individuals caught in the depths of deep sleep. Despite their art historical references, many viewers associated the images with death, sparking public backlash and exposing underlying fears of social precarity. Ultimately, the works were censored two days after their display. This article explores the underlying reasons behind the work’s censorship, underscoring how the images gave expression to societal discomfort with vulnerability and the pressures of a hyper-connected, 24/7 capitalist culture that prioritizes productivity and consumption over rest and reverie, as well as emphasizing the tension between the sacred and the profane in everyday life.
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
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