Artists as Historical Interventionists: Archival Appropriation & Re-Contextualization in the Art of Kara Walker and Shimon Attie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this thesis is to demonstrate how artists ? using Kara Walker and Shimon Attie as prime examples ? challenge the temporal limits of culturally traumatic historical events through appropriation and reclamation of the authorial voice of history. Furthermore, I will argue that Harper?s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated) (2005) by Walker and The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin?s Jewish Quarter (1991-3) by Attie accomplish the daring historical feat of representing the experiences of descendants of distinctly racialized individuals who have been oppressed, silenced, and otherwise unable to construct their own societally acceptable histories, specifically unassimilated Jews in Berlin in the 1920s - 1930s and African Americans in the antebellum era. In this thesis, I argue that Walker and Attie act as historical interventionists by manipulating archival visual representations of the ?reality? of highly volatile histories which are indelibly impressed upon their heritage.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".