Scenario Machine: Aesthetics of Absence in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s <i>45th Parallel</i> .
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 45th Parallel (Citation2022) is a 15-minute film of a performance staged with painted theatrical backdrops at the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a building constructed in 1904 on the United States and Canadian border, to symbolically mark the dividing line between the two countries. Abu Hamdan’s film narrates the real story of a fatal cross-border extra-judicial shooting at the US-Mexico border, re-told utilising the scenographic affordances of this setting to draw attention to the hypocrisy of border violence. In offering a detailed exposition of the work as encountered in its exhibition format, the article demonstrates how this is achieved through scenographic means and the activation of overt theatricality (e.g. painted backdrops, direct address, a musical underscore and multi-channel sound). By deploying the notion of theatre as an investigative form and mode of critique, the article considers how the scenographic approaches employed in 45th Parallel explicate the political potentiality of an aesthetics of absence and enable the disappeared protagonists of the stories being told to re-appear without either being dramatically represented or theatrically re-enacted.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| 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".