Through modes of shared study, rehearsal, 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.

A multi-platform research program, Matter of Intelligence, explores the origins, manifestations, and implications of intelligence across species, systems, and societies through art and critical inquiry. Matter of Intelligence considers intelligence not just as an abstract concept, but as something that manifests with tangible, material implications—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. 

The Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series—comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027—is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry. The seminars, alongside other VLC programs and initiatives, aim to question, rethink, and unsettle received notions of what intelligence is, what it does, and what it might yet become. Each seminar examines how intelligence is defined, expressed, and mobilized across various domains, including biological, social, technological, ecological, institutional, historical, and others. 

In a moment defined by the speculative promises of artificial intelligence and the pervasive undoing of intellectual life, these exchanges proposition and respond to emerging urgencies, shifting perspectives, and diverse modes of inquiry. Each seminar is paired with a curated reader on the Matter of Intelligence Are.na channel, grounding the dialogue and opening new paths for exploration.

The Matter of Intelligence seminars are presented as part of the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy series and are organized by Eriola Pira and Carin Kuoni. 

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.