Collectively Writing the Coven Intelligence Chronicles: Prologues and Protocols
Symposium:
Title:
- Collectively Writing the Coven Intelligence Chronicles: Prologues and Protocols
Organiser/Presenter(s):
Statement:
Theme: (Re)invented Alliances
“Writing the Coven Intelligence Chronicles: Prologues and Protocols” is a collaborative writing workshop and speculative workstation channeling symbiotic stories of a revolutionary cosmology. The workshop explores the intersection of technology, witchcraft and ecology through collaborative writing and storytelling.
We will examine a speculative history in which, generations ago, witches, peasants, and other anti-capitalists around the world predicted the rise of intelligent machines within the all-encompassing Capitalocene. These predictions generated spells that continue to invoke revolutionary ecologies of work between plants, machines, and witches across the planet today.
We begin by imagining the ways in which ‘sympoetic’ ecologies of witches, plants, and machines expand and contract in past and future worlds. Each participant receives a small notebook, a protocol, a physical object (a woven textile, plant material, seed packet, a sign, song, dance, message), a spell, a date, a location, and some kind of position in the narrative for their main character (ie. they are a spell writer, an international contact, a transmitter of predictions in own community/family/village, etc).
Participants interlace their stories, eg, a story about a witch who can merge with plants intersects with one about AI sabotaging monocrops on Indigenous lands. All participants will then weave stories into a visually and narratively cohesive pattern. The stories may be displayed in future exhibitions and entered into the Coven’s in-development participatory fabulation platform.
