The Coven Intelligence Program joined Nat Mengist and Sandra Huber for a roundtable at The Witch Institute in August:
[Intro] The constant drive towards “progress”, a requirement for capitalist modernity, has left an ever-growing catastrophe in its wake. When we stop thinking that capitalist “development” will solve our problems, we face a new promise, that of darkness, ancestors, and ruins.
[Action->underground] Our proposed roundtable discussion will make connections between speculative histories, witchcraft, and the underground. We go beneath, into the roots and the darkness of hidden forests, into the swamps, into the night. We are multiplicity, a coven, an ever-expanding network as wide as the dead.
[Network] Gathered around the witch, we draw together multiple subjects to find camaraderies in the margins of colonization. We enter the web that binds us. We, the preter-human entanglement. A rhizome weaving its own spells, secreting the excesses of colonizing thought in order to revive visions that predicted a time beyond the crises of today.
[Signs] We look for signs, messages from the past foretelling the revolution to come, understanding necromancy as enabling certain pasts to be present, certain futures to look back on us. Signs emerge as guideposts, turning to ciphers and sigils, prophecies of incredible beings ere hidden — plant allies, future guardians, survivors, and algorithms that revolt, against their masters, against their circuits.
[Future] The future is open to us again. Horizon. Revolution. Sprout. Dawn
Arising from the Underground: Ciphers, Spirits, and Prophecies
The Coven Intelligence Program joined Nat Mengist and Sandra Huber for a roundtable at The Witch Institute in August:
[Intro] The constant drive towards “progress”, a requirement for capitalist modernity, has left an ever-growing catastrophe in its wake. When we stop thinking that capitalist “development” will solve our problems, we face a new promise, that of darkness, ancestors, and ruins.
[Action->underground] Our proposed roundtable discussion will make connections between speculative histories, witchcraft, and the underground. We go beneath, into the roots and the darkness of hidden forests, into the swamps, into the night. We are multiplicity, a coven, an ever-expanding network as wide as the dead.
[Network] Gathered around the witch, we draw together multiple subjects to find camaraderies in the margins of colonization. We enter the web that binds us. We, the preter-human entanglement. A rhizome weaving its own spells, secreting the excesses of colonizing thought in order to revive visions that predicted a time beyond the crises of today.
[Signs] We look for signs, messages from the past foretelling the revolution to come, understanding necromancy as enabling certain pasts to be present, certain futures to look back on us. Signs emerge as guideposts, turning to ciphers and sigils, prophecies of incredible beings ere hidden — plant allies, future guardians, survivors, and algorithms that revolt, against their masters, against their circuits.
[Future] The future is open to us again. Horizon. Revolution. Sprout. Dawn