The middle of nowhere: the photographic search for an unknown landscape
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
This thesis and the accompanying photographic research explores the idea and experience of the “middle of nowhere”. It asks several questions including: Where is the “middle of nowhere” and what does it mean to arrive there? How is being in nowhere possible? Can we exist in space and time unrelated to place? What is the role of photography in helping us form a connection to an unknown landscape? Our modern world is explored, mapped, and imaged in its entirety. With the aid of satellites, global positioning systems, the Internet, closed circuit television, tourists with cameras, and mobile camera phones, there is no landscape left undocumented. Advances in transportation and technology make it possible to travel everywhere, anytime. In today’s world “nowhere” as an untouched and undiscovered landscape, cannot exist. Despite this fact, the search for “nowhere” continues through literature, advertising, tourism and the adventure travel industry, personal journeys, and photography. Through analysis of the historical conventions of landscape photography and contemporary visual culture, the “middle of nowhere” reveals itself as a visual metaphor for escape and environmental utopia. “Nowhere” is a journey for the unknown, and the recognition of presence felt in absence when faced with the unfamiliar (that presence being our own). It is a state of mind in which we glimpse the possibility of another world; one in which we can start over with the planet and ourselves. This thesis discusses our modern relationship to the landscape and resulting twenty-first century utopian ideals. My own search for “nowhere” in the landscapes of Canada and Australia, is documented in the accompanying photographic research.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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