Social Practice Before the Web: Networked Media in Canadian Art
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation examines the concurrent emergence of digital networks and participatory art practice in Canada over a period of five decades. Although much literature on network culture has provided for rich discussion of community and togetherness in the digital age, there has yet to be a cohesive and sustained historical analysis of this discussion in networked art. From the Eternal Network to the global village, to the virtual community and social media today, concepts of community have shifted in relation to technological development over the last fifty years. Artists have been at the forefront of articulating this movement in both digital and non-digital forms of social practice. This dissertation project looks to insights from art historical precedents to consider network culture today. The chapters are built from case studies of art projects that each employ a specific media network to create a temporary community. These include: Anna Banana’s (b. 1940) extended community produced through an ongoing, fifty-year practice of mail art exchange; the co-operative performance of Vera Frenkel’s (b. 1938) 1974 String Games, which used an early telematic network; a collaboratively-produced, site-specific textile installation in Laura Vickerson’s (b. 1959) Fairy Tales and Factories, 1999; and CyberPowWow, a platform for Internet-based artworks made by Indigenous artists, which was a project produced by the artist Skawennati (b. 1969) and many collaborators between 1997 and 2004. These are art projects that draw attention to intimate social encounters with diverse networked media, and they demonstrate how communications technologies can be used consciously and critically in the formation of temporary communities.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.048 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 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".