Occulting the screen : a methodology for manifesting agency through performative animation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis connects animation to arcane or shamanistic practice, as a speculation upon the effectiveness of moving images as sigils ‚Äö- symbolic representations of desired outcomes. The series of videos are handpainted rotoscope-style animations applied over photographic video, presented as short loops in the gallery context. The project builds upon dual traditions, first combined in Surrealism, of politicised esotericism and psychoanalytic theorising of the unconscious. Building on the Surrealist tradition, the thesis incorporates current neuroscientific knowledge of brain plasticity and references occult imagery to communicate the esoteric and intangible nature of cognition. The works manifest 'porosity' in their layered and fluid form and position the screen as an agent site; a place of mediation between what is, and what is willed. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (2007) defines contemporary, secularised society as a zone of 'buffered' identity as distinct from the more 'porous', enchanted existence of our forebears. This project sought to produce a contemporary porosity, and drew on the films of Stan Brakhage and the early short films of David Lynch, both of whom use the mark of 'the artists hand' as a means to make manifest upon film, what the camera cannot capture. In the manner of Canadian witch artist duo Fastw‚àö¬¿rms, and the radical, second wave feminist group W.I.T.C.H. (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), this project employed the promise of occult forces to remediate orthodox social forms. Themes of disenchantment, disengagement, the Freudian concept of wish-fulfilment and agency were developed in a studio process that harnessed performative and painterly gestures. Unfolding no narrative, the works are neither pictorial nor cinematic. They are both solid (held within a screen) and gossamer (projected light). The imagery was developed from improvised actions before the camera. The video footage was then transformed through automatist, ritualised overpainting of each frame, which was re-animated to produce a looping, rhythmic effect that operates like a repeating chorus or a mantra. The rhythmic aspect of the works equates to an active hoodoo mechanism: their occulted cycle is completed by an audience invited to enter an uncensored or 'gnostic' state. The project is invested in experiential, liminal and gnostic states and the pursuit of porosity, those of both maker and viewer. It is performed as a counteractive approach to rationalism and with acknowledgement of female potential and the power of intuitive states to human selfactualisation and consciousness. The artworks slip between the concrete actualisation of the still image and the temporal state of the moving image. Exhibited according to a spatial logic that lies between 'white cube' and 'black box', the works are activated through concentrated focus, and thus operate according to the logic of sigils: manifestations of wish or intent, strengthened through ritualised acts of will.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.002 |
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".