Personal Information
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Given name: Clareese 









Surname: Hill 









Email: C.hill@northeastern.edu









I understand that by submitting this form, I consent to the use of my data for the purposes of the 2026 Forum on Artistic Research'.: Yes









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Your contribution
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Title: Cosmologies of Worldbuilding









Format: Experimental format (4)









Main language: English









Abstract:
Researchers from the Lab of Speculative Repair propose a workshop exploring worldbuilding through divination and non-Western cosmologies. The lab is interested in worldbuilding as a pedagogical mechanism in games and how these understandings transfer into the real world. Facilitators will examine how divination technologies from African and Indigenous belief systems to tarot function as pedagogical tools that conjure a worldbuilding praxis centered on consent and speculative methods of repair. The workshop will support the development of an interactive oracle AI project and interrogate worldbuilding as a tool of repair in the design of interactive narrative XR applications. The workshop accommodates 10 to 12 self-selected participants over two hours. The lab will supply tarot decks; participants should bring large pads and writing materials. The workshop unfolds across three learning outcomes. The first explores the history of tarot, focusing on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and its illustrator, Pamela Colman Smith, a woman of color erased from her own work until the 2009 centennial, when U.S. Games finally renamed the deck in her honor. Participants will reflect on the contributions of women of color to worldbuilding and their systematic erasure.The second outcome examines overlaps between African, African American, and Indigenous cosmologies and contemporary divination practices as forms of social worldbuilding, exploring how these traditions evolved alongside tarot through queer, Black, Indigenous, and ecologically inspired decks.
The third outcome uses collective worldbuilding through active tarot reading to track what has and hasn't worked in prior worldbuilding frameworks, reconsidering speculation and the consent embedded in divination as a foundation for reimagining terraforming. The structural framework is the Kongo cosmogram, a cartographic chart from the Bakongo tradition mapping the relationality between the spirit world and the physical.










Image: https://www.sar2026.ie/system/files/webform/submit_contribution/429/Clareese_Hill%20-%201.jpeg









Short biographies of the presenter(s):
- Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher exploring the validity of the word "identity" from her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman through collaborating with emerging technology and meditative praxis. Clareese's practice materializes in performance, exhibition, and writing. She has disseminated her research internationally at Aalto University in Finland, Göteborgs Universitet Akademin Valand, The Royal College of Art, London, Goldsmiths University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The Chicago Art Department, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, and Emerson Contemporary, Boston. She was also a 2020 Rapid Response for a Better Digital Future fellow (Phase One). 
- Monica Storss is a poet and researcher whose work on Relationality and Emerging Technology is based out of Northeastern University and MIT. She is a Certified Listener Poet with The Good Listening Project. She is a founding member of The Laboratory for Speculative Repair at Northeastern University, an experimental working group that examines healing our relationship with technology and each other through experiential modalities.
- Angelique is a first-generation Afro-Indigenous embodied theatrical storyteller based in New England. They are a current CAMD PhD student at Northeastern University focusing on Black feminist narratives and embodied theatrical practices through research-based theatre. Their performance credits include: The Inferior Sex (Trinity Repertory Company), Soul Tapes (Brown/Trinity), An Octoroon (Gamm Theatre), A Midsummer Night's Dream (Gamm Theatre), and more. Their other accolades include: KCACTF finalist '21, National Young Playwright semi-finalist '21, Ronald McNair scholar '22, Lime Arts Twenty by Twenty Fringe Playwright '23 and Lin Manuel Miranda fellow '23, and Company One Volt Lab Playwright '24. 










Previous presentations or iterations of the research:
This work has not been presented previously.














Requirements
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Additional information:
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Spatial and technical requirements :
easels, flexible space, ability to play audio and video 










Potential risks or ethical concerns:
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