Seminar

Going to study clubs, having a personal curriculum, styling in librarian chic, reading a physical book, making a BookTok, starting a Substack, and #disgustinglyeducated all describe just some of the more viral internet trends or efforts to learn or seem “smart,” or what we might call intelligencemaxxing these days. While such efforts are neither new nor limited to the digital sphere, intelligencemaxxing speaks as much to the particular practices of pursuing offline intellectual and cultural activities and sharing them online as to the anxieties and desires of our present-day conjecture. 

Much like looksmaxxing, which maximizes physical attractiveness, intelligencemaxxing optimizes for intellectual performance, whether through the performative cultivation of an intellectual persona or the use of cognitive and attention-enhancing drugs to gain an edge in school, work, and the marketplace of ideas and desire. The same logics of metrics and optimization apply, as the final frontier of capitalism moves from augmenting and exploiting our bodies to exploiting and improving the self and our brains. At a time of otherwise widespread anti-intellectualism, intelligencemaxxing and its corollaries, IQ-maxxing or brain-maxxing, reveal a response to the same as well as to the growing literacy crisis, distrust in higher education, the need to combat brainrot and doomscrolling, the desire to distinguish oneself from AI slop, and a search for cultural capital in the absence of physical capital. 

intelligencemaxxing, the ninth in the Vera List Center’s Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series, brings together researchers, artists, and “intellectual influencers” to explicate this trend and the socio-political conditions driving it. What do we actually have when maxing out “intelligence” as a lifestyle? With Ruby Justice Thelot, designer, artist & cyberethnographer, and other speakers to be announced. The program is co-curated and moderated by Eriola Pira, VLC Curator and Programs Director, and artist and curator Rosaline Dou. 

Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
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. 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. 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.