Abstract
Drawing on forking practices in software development, sampling practices in audio production, my work with collage art, and the speculative archival work of Saidiya Hartman, I've been trying to develop new artistic forms more sensitive to the networked nature of our histories and futures. Enter incarnations: a literary form in which you rewrite a historical text and set it in a far future, and write it from the perspective of your future self. The form also functions as a strategy for intervening in processes of "copyright"-making by challenging traditional conventions of authorship and (self-)publishing. Finally, incarnations also fall under a new, umbrella genre of speculative writing I call autofabulation, conceived as an explicitly anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-oppressive artform intended to allow its practitioner to actively work towards liberation. This event will also include generative prompts that encourage participants to engage in their own forms of speculative archival work, including—but not limited to—writing their own incarnations.