The Skullcracker Suite: A Long-term Interdisciplinary Artistic Research Project Investigating Processes of Cultural Decolonisation in British Columbia (Portfolio)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Skullcracker Suite is a long-term artistic research project investigating processes of cultural decolonization in British Columbia from ethnographic, science-fictional and First Nations perspectives. Drawing on the mythology, dances and art of the Kwakwaka’wakw peoples of British Columbia, The Skullcacker Suite takes its name from Hox’hok, one of three giant cannibal birds of Kwakiutl legend. Hox’hok’s skull-cracking and brain-eating powers are imagined as a dramatic allegory for the interwoven process of colonial violence, indigenous resistance and the metaphysics of predation that bind human and non-human beings in a system of mutual, ecological and entangled co-dependency. The first phase of the project – ‘BC Time-Slip (The Empire Never Ended)’ – began with a one-month residency at Dynamo Arts Association in Vancouver in August 2016 where the gallery was made into a research installation investigating the story of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s stay at a First Nations rehab clinic called X-Kalay. The residency included public talks, seminars, group discussions, lecture presentations, a film program and the creation of a series of photospheres (360° videos) depicting Dick’s time in the city, myself playing the author.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".