Dinner

VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence brings together visionary artists, curators, scholars, technologists, and cultural thinkers for an electrifying series of talks, performances, and live broadcasts that collectively illuminate the many forms intelligence can take. 

Along with a keynote lecture, music, VLC Fellows, and performances, the 2025 VLC Community Dinner invites guests to engage with the mind-gut axis—linking cognition, emotion, and digestion—through a curated multi-sensory, shared meal. The evening becomes both a convivial gathering and a relational exploration of intelligence that extends beyond the brain. More than a meal, the Community Dinner is a catalyst—an experiment in collective thinking and feeling that sets the stage for bold ideas, unexpected connections, and powerful new insights to unfold over the next two years. 

This year’s dinner also features tarot and coffee cup readers and other practitioners of traditional forms of divination, inviting reflection on how different cultures have long approached the question of what can be known, intuited, or predicted. Set alongside conversations about AI, algorithms, and technological prediction, these encounters offer playful, poetic, and embodied ways of thinking about intelligence. Set around a long table and open to all, the evening is about connecting with others and letting big ideas simmer. It’s an invitation to enact and embody collective intelligence—with our minds, our bodies, and our appetites. Informal, welcoming, and a little experimental, the VLC Community Dinner nurtures spontaneous conversation and radical hospitality, opening space for new social, philosophical, and somatic inquiries.

Divination practices with artists Tania Khouri and Jia Sung. DJ set by Lamin Fofana.