Phantasms of Interpretation: Raphaëlle de Groot's Portraits de clients
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Portraits de clients (2007) is the title of a performative intervention presented by Raphaëlle de Groot (b. 1974) inside a disused bank building in downtown Ottawa. In this work, de Groot invited visitors to engage with her in the creation of “blind” collaborative portraits of past clients of the bank. Building on my experience of this work, this thesis examines Portraits de clients in relation to its immediate critical and artistic context. A series of entries analyzing the intervention’s relational procedures and somatic effects, as well as its complex relation to its institutional context, serve to bring the most important features of the work into relief. \n\tThis thesis also queries the stakes involved when one’s attachment to an object—here, a Polaroid portrait produced as part of de Groot’s intervention—becomes a key factor in art historical learning and research. Against this backdrop, discussions of the photographic punctum and the phantasm, of the fetish and the souvenir, of “un-mastery” and representational transformation, expand current conceptions of the artist’s oeuvre, while opening new avenues for thinking about interpretative desire and critical intent. \n\tAs the attached subject in question, I draw on W. J. T. Mitchell’s notion of the “metapicture” and Michael Ann Holly’s idea of “prefiguration” to consider de Groot’s employment of ethnographic and participatory artistic methods. Finding these theoretical approaches to be at once useful and restrictive, I argue for an understanding of Portraits de clients as a vantage point from which to consider the current convergence of artistic and scholarly modes of research.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".