The Powers: Consult the Fates: A Conversation with Emily Pelstring, Katherine Kline, and Jessica Mensch
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it