The sleep of reason produces monsters: Steven Shearer’s Profaned Travelers
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 Despite their art historical references, many viewers associated the images with death, sparking public backlash and exposing underlying fears of social precarity.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.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 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".