In a globe-encompassing convening, the VLC Forum 2026 presents the Jane Lombard Fellows, finalists for the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, alongside recipient Rosana Paulino. In conversation with their nominators or invited guests, the Nepalese art collective ArTree Nepal, New York-based artist Stephanie Dinkins, Hawaiian and Samoan digital media theorist and poet Jason Edward Lewis from Canada, and Finnish artist Jenna Sutela share their nominated projects and their engagement with the material and intangible dimensions of intelligence. 

12 pm | Jenna Sutela in conversation with Elvia Wilk

2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow Jenna Sutela joins writer and collaborator Elvia Wilk to discuss a practice that moves across contemporary art, the life sciences, and emerging technologies. Drawing on more than a decade of shared dialogue, they discuss Sutela’s sustained engagement with more-than-human forms of intelligence from microbes to animals to machines.

Focusing on nimiia cétiï, a work that brings together biological organisms and neural networks to imagine new forms of language and relation, they reflect on how Sutela’s 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice nominated project unsettles distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the biological and the computational, while opening broader questions about algorithmic governance, ecological interdependence, and the ethics of living with increasingly intelligent technologies. By positioning artistic inquiry as a site for critical experimentation, they explore how artistic practices that attend to more-than-human intelligence can challenge extractive models of innovation and offer new ways of thinking about justice across human, technological, and planetary scales. 

1 pm | Lunch

2 pm | Stephanie Dinkins in conversation with Neta Bomani

2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow Stephanie Dinkins revisits her landmark project Conversations with Bina48 in a conversation with organizer and educator Neta Bomani. 

Since 2014, Dinkins has been in conversation with the social robot Bina48 (Breakthrough Intelligence via Neural Architecture, 48 exaflops per second), using the exchange to explore the boundaries between artificial and human consciousness through the intersecting lenses of race and gender. Nominated for the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice, Conversations with Bina48 provides the starting point for a conversation on the broader trajectory of Dinkins’ artistic practice and how Bina48 has modeled alternative ways of engaging with AI that invite us to question the racial dynamics embedded in artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning. Together with Bomani, they discuss technological future histories, Afro-now-ism, and the “continuum of intelligences” that encompass technology (artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and gene editing). They place this inquiry within an expanded understanding of the intelligence of natural systems, from mycelial networks to other more-than-human forms of communication and knowledge.

3 pm | Jason Edward Lewis in conversation with Mashinka Hakopian

2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow Jason Edward Lewis is joined by scholar, artist, and 2025–2027 Vera List Center Fellow Mashinka Hakopian for a conversation on Abundant Intelligences, an Indigenous-led research program and network across Canada, the United States, and New Zealand that reimagines the futures of artificial intelligence through Indigenous knowledge systems. Abundant Intelligences was nominated for the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice.

Drawing on critical AI studies, anticolonial approaches to technology, and Indigenous epistemologies, Lewis and Hakopian explore how Indigenous knowledge systems, refined through millennia of community- and land-oriented intelligence, challenge dominant conceptions of intelligence and illustrate the colonial practices that inform the computational systems underpinning AI. Together they consider how technologies might be designed to work in relation with existing lifeways, sustain reciprocal relationships between interspecies worlds, and cultivate conditions of abundance rather than extraction and scarcity. Recognizing the multiplicity of ways of being intelligent in the world, their conversation asks what becomes possible when AI is designed to prioritize the flourishing of human and non-human kin alike. 

4 pm | ArTree Nepal in conversation with Prabal Gurung

2025–2027 Jane Lombard Fellow ArTree Nepal members are joined by Nepali American fashion designer and Parsons School of Fashion alum Prabal Gurung for a conversation exploring how artistic practice can serve as a tool for collective struggle, cultural continuity, and liberation. ArTreeNepal, a collective of five artists and curators, each from a different Indigenous background—Lavkant Chaudhary (Tharu), Hit Man Gurung (Tamu), Mekha Limbu (Yakthung), Sheelasha Rajbhandari (Newa), and Subas Tamang (Tamang)—practices contemporary art with the belief that art has deep roots in social practice. As a designer, Gurung draws on personal history, cultural identity, and fashion as a form of storytelling. 

In New York, ArTree members Lavkant Chaudhary, Mekh Limbu, and Subas Tamang center their conversation on Tika Chhedna Angana (“A Garden of Body Markings”), the project for which the collective was nominated for the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. Inspired by Indigenous tattooing practices in Nepal, the project approaches body markings as living pedagogies that weave together body, art, ecology, and community. Together, the artists and Gurung reflect on the significance of these traditions and the collective’s ongoing initiatives, opening space to conditions of embodiment, Indigenous pedagogies, and the need to move beyond frameworks that exoticize or diminish lived knowledge and Indigenous worldviews.