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Record W7147269056 · doi:10.1080/23322551.2026.2627163

Scenario Machine: Aesthetics of Absence in Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s <i>45th Parallel</i> .

2025· article· en· W7147269056 on OpenAlex
Richard Allen

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueTheatre & Performance Design · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicContemporary Literature and Criticism
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPerspective (graphical)ClothingFace (sociological concept)NarrativePhotography

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

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.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.892
Threshold uncertainty score0.697

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.021
GPT teacher head0.224
Teacher spread0.203 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it