Playing the Self and Other Otherwise: A B Movie Journey through Low-Expectation Co-Creativity and Outsider Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
My co-creator David Ross and I made what we called ‘ethnographic B movies’ as the central element of my doctoral fieldwork. These low budget and cheesy speculative fiction films, written primarily by David, became an opportunity for him to share his ideas of a revolution based on the concept of the Musicality of Reality. The films gave David a chance to perform himself otherwise: no longer on the socio-economic margins, as a failed academic living on a senior’s fixed income, but as a legitimate thinker leading a global movement. Together, we gave into and created a mad world of possibility, a place where I could also become an Other to my ethnographic self, performing a version of my actual self as always unsure about what was happening in the field. In this visual essay, I share a series of film stills in a montage-like fashion and with an accompanying text, to mirror the absurd silliness of our films inspired by the B movie genre. I focus on moments across our filmic output that highlight how giving into playfulness provided very serious self-disclosure opportunities both for David and for myself. By bringing the reader into the space of our films in this way, I want to encourage others to experiment and play with the possibilities of ethnographic becoming afforded by low aesthetic expectations and absurdist creativity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
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.
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 teacher head, 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".