We are pleased to announce our fall 2025 lineup of programs and the launch of our 2025—2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. This two-year transdisciplinary inquiry explores the subject of intelligence across species, systems, and societies through art and critical study.

Through a constellation of public programs, fellowship projects, publications, and exhibitions, Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds.

This fall, we begin to unfold the central questions and provocations that will guide this inquiry. We’re pleased to offer a preview of the boundary-pushing ideas and unexpected connections that will emerge throughout this Focus Theme, as well as this season’s events that will set the stage for the cycle ahead.

To keep up to date, please visit our website or follow us on Instagram.

SEMINARS
Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series

Through shared study and iterative dialogue with invited artists, thinkers, and the public, the VLC Seminar Series develops and presents artistic and scholarly research centered on the Vera List Center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027, the Seminar Series is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry. The seminars, each accompanied by a reader on the Matter of Intelligence Are.na channel, aim to question, rethink, and unsettle received notions of what intelligence is, what it does, and what it might yet become. Join us this fall for:

Seminar 1: Paying Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of the Intellectual
Monday, September 29, 2025
6:30–8 pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, The New School
63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York

Seminar 1 convenes cross-disciplinary New School faculty—Omri Boehm, Simon Critchley, Camonghne Felix, Sean Jacobs, Natasha Lennard, Ethan Philbrick, and Cresa Pugh—to reflect on the notion of the public intellectual—its histories and internal contradictions, the shifting roles it has played in public life, and the possibilities it may still hold. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni.

Seminar 2: Of Matter
Monday, November 10, 2025
7–8:30 pm EST
Online

How does matter think, and what does it mean to think with matter? Seminar 2 invites inquiry into the nature of matter, exploring matter—and by extension, intelligence—not simply as substance but as process, dynamic, relational, and always in formation. With Laura Tripaldi, a transdisciplinary researcher at the interface of science, technology, and speculative thinking, and Harpreet Sareen, designer, researcher, and artist. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Eriola Pira.

Seminar 3: Cosmic Intelligence
Saturday, December 6, 2025
2–4 pm EST
Performance Space New York
150 1st Ave 4th floor, New York

Cosmic Intelligence, co-presented as part of the VLC’s Seminar Series with Performance Space New York as part of its We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids, explores the possibility that intelligence is not only of the mind, but emerges through planetary, cosmic, relational, and distributed systems—woven into the very dynamics that shape existence across scale. Participants and other details to be announced.

BOOK LAUNCH
As for Protocols x Convivialities
Friday, October 3, 2025
6:30–8 pm EDT
Critical Distance Centre for Curators
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 122
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Critical Distance hosts the joint Toronto launch of the VLC’s latest anthology As for Protocols (Vera List Center/Amherst College Press 2025) and Montréal-based writer and editor Michael Nardone’s Convivialities: Dialogues on Poetics (Talonbooks 2025). Nardone is joined by the VLC’s Re’al Christian, co-editor of As for Protocols, for a conversation on the editorial/curatorial practices and perspectives at the core of the two volumes. Together, Christian and Nardone will consider how the array of artists and writers involved in their editions articulate the contemporary conditions, relational affinities, and protocols of making.

ANNUAL FORUM
VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence
October 17 & 18, 2025
The New School and Online

The Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence brings together interdisciplinary cultural thinkers around the subject of intelligence, exploring both its material and intangible implications. Anchored by the newly announced VLC Fellows—Moriah Evans, Mashinka Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika—this year’s VLC Forum offers a first public glimpse into their unfolding fellowship projects. Each artist is joined by a special guest of their choice in dialogue or parallel inquiry.

Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli delivers the keynote lecture, with a response by media scholar David Bering-Porter. The annual VLC Community Dinner explores the mind-gut axis through food, setting the stage for bold ideas, unexpected connections, and powerful new insights into the intelligence Focus Theme unfolding over the next two years. Other participants include Meredith Broussard, Catherine D’Ignazio, Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez, Lamin Fofana, André Lepecki, Tania Khouri, Tiara Roxanne, and Jia Sung.

AICA-USA DISTINGUISHED CRITIC LECTURE
Kellie Jones: BODY / KNOWLEDGE
Monday, December 1, 2025
6:30–8 pm EST
Theresa Lang Community and Student Center, The New School
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York
In-person and online

Art historian and curator Kellie Jones delivers the 19th annual AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, co-presented with the VLC. In this lecture, Jones reflects on the theoretical legacy and cultural production of Black women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, raising questions of intellectual lineage and material knowledge.

DIGITAL PUBLISHING SERIES
Post/doc

Post/doc is the Vera List Center’s biannual digital publishing series for discursive, speculative, and experimental writing and artistic practices that respond to the Center’s programmatic Focus Themes. The Fall 2025 edition of Post/doc includes Georgian artist Levani (Levan Mindiashvili), whose project mediates on embodied consciousness within collective resistance movements. Additional Post/doc contributors to be announced later this fall. Explore previous editions on our website.

DIGITAL PROJECT
Matter of Intelligence Are.na

The Matter of Intelligence Are.na is a research and publishing channel of the Vera List Center’s two-year Focus Theme. It collects and shares the curatorial ideas, questions, and research framework guiding the Center’s inquiry. The channel is an iterative and continually expanding constellation of materials—spanning from academic texts, artworks, to CIA Twitter posts, whether directly or obliquely related to intelligence—connected and activated across the VLC’s programmatic strands. Are.na’s rhizomatic structure mirrors the very nature of intelligence: sprawling, interconnected, sometimes chaotic. It also reflects the ethos of Matter of Intelligence, grounded in a commitment to shared learning, collaborative research, the co-creation of knowledge, and an embodiment of collective intelligence.