Traps as Artworks & Artworks as Traps. Towards a model for life-sustaining art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This is a project about how anthropology can inform art practice, and vice-versa, explored through an ethnography conducted in parallel with four art commissions. The thesis is shaped by my creative collaboration with Nigel — a professional molecatcher whose interest in art and education led to conversations which catalysed my own comparative toggling between art practice and hunting practice, as well as art and anthropological perspectives. Working with Nigel and other pest control hunters in rural North Yorkshire, I investigate the creative mediums and methods they employ to negotiate boundaries in the land and differences in species perspective. I probe the underground reciprocities that form between the repressed perspectives of ‘pest’ animals, land spirits and working-class hunters, tracking them under hedges and fences as they harness and entrap inalienable value from places where none is conventionally perceived. In the accompanying practice-portfolio I explore four ways of doing this artistically. Moving between written and practice-based work, I chart the tensions between a silenced “Hunting Attitude” and a dominant “Natural Attitude” in England and explore the ways in which this perspectival discrepancy can itself be worked to the hunter/artist’s advantage. I also call upon Metis (a trickster intelligence and goddess of traps) to articulate “reverse creativity”—the particular kind of practical intelligence that is needed not only to set a good trap, but also to escape one. A “Hunting Attitude” adopted in art proposes situated practice that yields to the perspectives of nonhuman others, engaging the complexity of death-work and drawing attention to purifying boundary-structures that might themselves be probed, entered and inhabited in a life-sustaining way. This in turn suggests methods for negotiating between art and anthropological perspectives, and ways for undermining and re-rooting extractive and anthropocentric frameworks of thought.
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.
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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 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".