The Powers: Consult the Fates: A Conversation with Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Powers is an artistic and scholarly performance collective between Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch. Together they produce music, television series, video work, incantations, and performance pieces that disrupt white-patriarchal myths of the witch. As part of the Witch Institute, hosted at Queen’s University in August 2021, The Powers shared their anti-colonial and feminist oracle deck with participants remotely via Zoom. Throughout the performance, participants were invited to choose a card from The Powers’ “Consult the Fates” Oracle deck, to have their fates foretold. Inspired by famous critical race scholar bell hooks, each card cleverly asked participants to rethink, dismantle, and destroy the “white-supremacist-capitalist-imperialist-hetero-patriarchy.” Audience members familiar with The Powers oeuvre will undoubtedly have recognized several of the hand-drawn characters such as the Squid, Hairball, Blob, and Skelly, who have appeared in previous performances as part of The Powers’ multiverse.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.032 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".