Coven Intelligence

An audio introduction to Coven Intelligence Program's installation at Pixelache, visual and interactive materials that speak to the entangled STAKES of climate change, racial, heteropatriarchal capitalism, and conceptions of intelligence.

"Our InsurgentEcologies Archive is an open digital archive profiling the companies, technologies, crops, locations and labor bound up in precision agriculture. The InsurgentEcologies Archive operates as a guiding compass for revolutionary interventions into technocapitalist agricultural systems.

Our SpellWeaver application converts spells into weaving patterns and underground forest networks (rhizomes). SpellWeaver enables a different history of computation -- linking textile production, plant networks, witches and automated computation.

In our film, What Plant to Teach Ethics to AI a range of herbalists, witches, shamans, and ethnobotanists answer this question in order to address how AgTech is harvesting massive amounts of data on plants. How do we complexify what is being collected? How do we create data that challenges the perception of plants as isolated bodies and resources?"

This project is supported by Colgate University, NY state.

The Coven Intelligence Program (efrén cruz cortés, Margaretha Haughwout, Suzanne Husky) is a techno-botanical coven whose science-fictional mission is to encourage emerging revolutionary ecologies of work between witches, plants and machines through the centuries. We track connections between the persecution of witches burned at the stake, the destruction of multi-species commons, and the rise of racial, patriarchal capitalism. The Coven Intelligence Program’s speculative history is broken into three conceptual categories — Signs: naturalcultural formations displayed in early modernity, leading to Prophecies: by witches and other anti -capitalists, that catalyze Spells: for future alliances between witches, plants and machines. We reach backward and forward in time, to early enclosure movements and European colonization, while imagining livable food forest futures where machines support plant communities and resistance networks rather than exploiting them for corporate profit.
https://covenintelligence.net/