Ahead of their inaugural presentations as Vera List Center Fellows at the VLC Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence, Moriah Evans, Joyce Joumaa, Mashinka Hakopian, and Kira Xonorika join VLC Senior Director/Chief Curator Carin Kuoni and Curator and Programs Director Eriola Pira for a roundtable discussion around art-making as research and knowledge production. They consider knowledge in its embodied, relational, and resistant dimensions, both within and working against dominant Western frameworks. From Indigenous world-building to community-driven data sets, they explore collective intelligence as a space for imagining otherwise, where making and knowing are inseparable, continually in motion, and central to their artistic and intellectual practices.

 This conversation took place on July 22, 2025, over Zoom and has been edited for length and clarity.

Eriola Pira: The Vera List Center Fellowship is essentially a research fellowship for artists and a range of practitioners. A lot of what we do at the VLC is to think about the relationship between art and research, the connection between art and knowledge production, in terms of program design and implementation as well as thematically, as is the case with this Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence, which posits art as a form of intelligence and intellectual activity. To start, how do you each see the relationship between art, research, and knowledge production in your work? Is research something you do before you start making, or is it part of the process itself? And how do things like intuition, experimentation, or even failure and playfulness fit into that?

Moriah Evans: I think art making is constant research—it always happens during and continues past the event or the object. I feel like intuition is always present as well. It’s a guiding hook or tool that drives and conducts my research and my interest as I make performances. There’s a feedback loop of information that arises, and then goes further in X, Y, and Z directions, or counter directions, which has a lot to do with intuition, failure, play, and things like that. Sometimes I feel like I have a disciplinary chip on my shoulder as someone who predominantly makes dance, because I think dance is often subjugated as an art form, in part because it’s seen as feminized [through] a kind of patriarchal history and Cartesian logic. This has been undone in much of the thinking around questions of intelligence or consciousness. But I think infrastructures and epistemes in Western capitalism still uphold many of those logics. I really advocate for [dance] as a mechanism of knowledge production—it does not often enter the canon or the academy in such a fashion, I think because [it deals] predominantly with the body, [and] because people aren’t always educated or invited to analyze, textually, what happens in movement expressions.

Joyce Joumaa: My artistic practice typically begins with research, which has become a foundation for how I develop work. I’ve come to understand research not just as information gathering, but, let’s say, a form of translation. The more deeply I investigate a subject, the more tools I have as an artist to translate those findings into a visual language. In regard to the question of intuition and experimentation, it’s quite inherent to my practice, or these attempts of translation. As research-based artists, I don’t necessarily believe that our job is to provide definitive conclusions or neat resolutions to the investigations we undertake. Rather, I see our role as opening up multiple entry points, creating what I like to call “dispatches of knowledge” that allow viewers to engage with the material in multiple ways on their own.

Mashinka Hakopian: Picking up on Moriah’s reference to feedback loops, I often describe the relationship between research and making in my practice as a recursive feedback loop, in the sense that it’s very difficult to extricate them from one another or to identify them as two discrete strands. My practice is fairly hybrid—and I think of myself as a researcher practitioner or scholar practitioner—I consider the ways in which knowledge making is inseparable from making. The attempt to sequester those two domains from one another is part and parcel of the larger project of reinforcing thinking and doing, or cognition and doing, as two discrete categorical entities, which my work seeks to dismantle.

Kira Xonorika: Yeah, I think of research as a non-linear process. [It starts] with different forms of obsession around colors, textures, and pieces of information that spark some form of interest on a very deep level. It’s something that moves a part of me and generates a particular form of friction, and that’s how the work of making starts. I see intuition as something inherently ancestral—a collective, intergenerational force that guides us through a form of pattern recognition and an invisible dimension, pulling us in a certain direction. Recently, I developed a performance with a robot dog, and it really started from this binary of fear and fascination that I have studied for a long time in liminal encounters with otherness. The performance playfully explores an uncanny collapse of time. In my research, play is essential—it connects to a childlike way of engaging with the sensory world. Research is something that is ongoing. And as most have said today, it’s not possible to separate them, as it’s very experimental for me.

Carin Kuoni: What I am taking away from all four of you is that the position of research is ongoing. You spoke, of course, about cognition and practice—both of those being ways of generating knowledge, but the knowledge is never [completely] arrived at. Building on that, what would be your definition of knowledge. In what sense might knowledge become a given? How do you arrive at knowledge? Is art generating a particular kind of knowledge? Is it allowing you to produce or reveal something distinct that one could not know without the process of making art? And in that sense, does your work as an artist or as a scholar practitioner, as Mashinka said, make [forms of intelligence or knowledge] visible or legible? What kinds of knowledge do you think art is uniquely capable of producing or revealing?

Moriah: It’s complicated. There are so many types of art and so many types of knowledge. That being said, I do believe in art as a space to think otherwise. Art is a space that conducts different types of empathy, [or] interconnectivity between people and other beings as well as non-beings. It opens up pathways that might not be already circumscribed in systems of knowledge and thought.  So many artists tease out other possibilities of systems of understanding that we are living within. I suppose that a lot of these forms of knowledge or intelligence that get opened up and teased out are somatic, ancestral, intuitive, and relational.

I work with bodies and live performance, and consider the knowledge within the interiority of a person’s body—what others behold when encountering the presence of another is a relational paradigm. Much of such an exchange is not really verbal or easily put into written language. It’s more a showering of intuitions, drives, forces—some social, political, emotional—that make people feel more. And for me, that objective of knowledge production, of making people feel more, is one of the [roles] that art has in knowledge production. We could talk about this question all day.

Joyce: Yeah. I like the idea of the relational. I remember encountering Trinh T. Minh-ha’s ideas around undocumented filmmaking, but particularly the process of “speaking nearby,” rather than speaking about. That idea has stayed with me and led me to think very deeply about proximity and the kind of knowledge that closeness can generate. When you’re working near a subject, whether it’s a community, a history, or a material process, you’re not trying to master it or explain it; instead, you’re allowing yourself to be affected by it and to learn from that proximity. And so, what is also at the core of my practice, from a more concrete standpoint, is the social psychology in Lebanon, specifically how Lebanese people come to deal with corrupt infrastructures, finding ways to adapt or navigate these corrupt systems. And I feel that within that process of navigating or adapting, there’s a particular kind of knowledge that is found or performed. But in the context, for example, of Lebanon, this knowledge is found or performed through the lack of access, rather than through the excess of access. And so this is how I work through this idea of knowledge, or ways of even constructing it from a social standpoint.

Mashinka: Yes, that’s very resonant for me. And I love your invocation of “speaking nearby” and the centering of embodiment in knowledge. Much of my work is about the rejection of the rationalist theory of mind, which holds that there are external observers processing the external data points of a pre-existing given world from which they can separate themselves. A lot of that taps into the histories of feminist critiques of technoscience and critiques of the view from nowhere, which is always a view from somewhere, a very particular somewhere.

We can think instead about situated knowledges, which very much align with the practice of speaking nearby and are also bound up with ancestral knowledges that are transgenerationally transmitted, that are collectively developed, that emerge in contexts of sociality. I also think very closely about diasporic and collective memory alongside knowledge, ways of knowing that offer counter-narratives to erasure in the face of dispersal, dispossession, and displacement. So I’m really thinking about knowledge-making as world-making, in the SWANA [Southwest Asia and North Africa] context more broadly, and in the Armenian context.

Kira: Yeah, in my work, knowledge emerges from peeling off layers and undoing. More specifically, understanding binaries to dismantle them as polarities and as tropes of intelligence, as tropes of the Western world that have had their effect on Indigenous knowledge and community, in efforts to erase them. Counteracting those very limited and narrow forms of understanding and navigating the world through Indigenous cosmologies and weird epistemologies.

And to add to what Mashinka was saying, I’m also interested in world-making and world-building, understanding that there exists a colonial world but with art, [we can] reimagine what another world could be like, or worlds that exist despite the legacies of acculturation. Art has allowed me to understand myself, Kira, as a garden. A garden that exists as a body that holds cellular movements and support this infrastructure that is my body, but also cellular movement that remembers what it was like to chant, to hum, and to gather with family in the Paraná River in South America, to wake up to the sound of birdsong in Tovaangar and commuting with the people that exist here in this land. I’m thinking a lot about intelligence as eco-somatic, how we are inseparable from land, and how the pain of land is also our pain, and the joy of land is also our joy. I guess what I’m trying to say is that eco-somatic intelligence is eco-somatic memory.

Carin: Tying together these notions of speaking in proximity and being a garden, and at the same time thinking of the Vera List Center or The New School, or any efforts at sharing knowledge, learning knowledge, teaching knowledge, I would love to ask you about how you envision and approach the idea of not just producing knowledge, but making it available, accessible to broad publics.

Moriah: I think there are a lot of forces at play where knowledge is being exchanged or extracted. My role as an artist [is embedded] in the whole knowledge production system, but at the same time I’m very suspicious of the system that upholds the power of knowledge.

Eriola: That’s an important point. You surface this tension between producing, extracting, and capturing knowledge. Let’s sit with that. Does anyone want to pick up on this thread: power dynamics that inevitably come up when we think about how knowledge is captured, how it gets verified, evaluated, and classified?

Mashinka: Most of us here are working on forms of knowledge that are para-institutional or anti-institutional, or not interested in any kind of institutional legitimization. [We’re talking about] knowledge that emerges in communities and moments of crisis, or knowledge that is stored in the body and its lived experiences, or knowledge that is formed around a kitchen table—sites that have not historically been ascribed epistemic legitimacy. But then the question emerges, what happens when those forms of knowledge are brought into institutional spaces, subjected to market logics, or translated in some way beyond their sites of origin?

[Those questions] are being asked right now in spaces around AI and data ethics. On the one hand, there are enormous omissions in dominant data sets of communities, languages, visual cultures, and knowledge systems that are not represented. And on the other hand, the terminating point of our political horizons, or horizons of knowledge, should not be the inclusion of those data sets in these hegemonic models, but instead should be the total abolition of these dominant models and the creation of new spaces for the circulation of those alternative knowledge systems and alternative data sets.

Eriola: This will echo throughout the next two years. I also want to touch on something that’s come up here and in our curatorial research, the notion of embodiment or situated knowledge and its material foundations. Thinking of form not just as vessels, but as collaborators in the making and transmission of knowledge opens up new possibilities. In your work—whether through movement, performance, video, sculpture, writing, or sound—when does form or materiality take the lead, and what kinds of knowledge does it bring forth? This connects to a key question framing our focus on intelligence and upcoming programming: might intelligence be an emergent property of matter? As artists, I’m curious how you engage with this—how you think through form, as well as other objects and material presences, as active participants in knowledge and meaning-making.

Kira: In my practice, I write whenever I’m deeply frustrated about something and I need to get to the core of it to understand what it is about a particular subject that is keeping me in a certain loop and how to unlock or dismantle the architecture of certain ideas. Writing for me has always been about having more structure to understand that architecture. Whereas image making has always been about [being] informed by this set of ideas, using color and movement and texture to generate a different form of world-building or generate a new form of temporality within new conditions. And this inevitably makes me think of my position as an Indigenous artist and the effort of transliterating language—first understanding Spanish, Portuguese, and English—in my own personal history. I can translate all these ideas from the Guarani language into these Euro-colonial and common languages that we speak, while also trying to circumvent those logics with AI. What I love about working with AI is the potential to access the unconscious, to access memory and the techno-spiritual realms. In a way that honors something that [existed] before the great trauma of coloniality.

Joyce: Yeah, for context, I work a lot with video. In different ways, I think it’s a medium that is unique in how close it can be to reality; it has this capacity to visually depict it, while also engaging our other senses. That was, in part, what I tried to achieve in Memory Contours. What I’m interested in, is this idea of mediation through intervention. And so in Memory Contours, I created this documentary piece around that intelligence testing at Ellis Island.

I also wanted to ask what we all thought about the idea of mediation. To Carin’s question about methodology and process, maybe mine is one of mediation—as opposed to classifying or categorizing—types of knowledges or intelligence. Going back to documentary filmmaking, I often combine  fiction or re-enactments that are derived from real interviews with people. I’m reflecting on the relationship between collaborations and field work. Of course, when you talk about field work, you also talk about physical proximity, which we’re trying to shift away from in some sort of way. But for me, field work, let’s say with people who hold a particular type of knowledge, is part of how the work comes together as well.

Carin: That’s a lovely segue to another question that we had about collaborations and the potential of collective intelligence. You’re all deeply involved in collaborative practices, and engage other people, human beings, but also non-human beings, traditions, and memories. We would love to dive a little deeper into the question of collective intelligence and to explore it, not just as a concept, but as something that is actually experienced and lived and felt.

Moriah: I think about this a lot because the discipline I work in is inherently relational, but I also think collective intelligence is infrastructure. Going back to what  Kira was saying about AI is that it is quite collective, somehow. It obliterates the individual in some weird, creepy, invisible, organic machine that’s also destroying environments. In terms of collective intelligence, something I think about often is the relationship between whatever we call choreography and what we call dancing. There are assumed hierarchies among those who initiate and organize projects and the bodies that execute [the choreography]. A big part of my work has been about deterritorializing the body and fragmenting it. Any singular body is composed of many, many bodies and systems of knowledge and information, like an ecosystem. And the collective force of perception, intention, biology is again, always there, but it’s often invisibilized.

Kira: Well, for me, everything that we do is collective. Everything is part of a larger engine in an ongoing movement that serves to sustain life. In regard to that performance, and to go back to the question of research, I had arrived at this binary of fear and fascination. Being a trans, queer body moving through the world in Paraguay, at some point, I had this constant sense of surveillance and these feelings of being an object. But I also projected these ideas that were once projected onto my body and into the bodies of people who are part of my collective, trans group of people. Playing around with the robot, other ideas emerged. And I started thinking about cognition, but not how we would understand cognition as humans, but as a speculative intention, while being very mindful that it doesn’t fall into this eugenic, hierarchical idea about what it means to be alive and intelligent.

Mashinka: Yes, a recent and ongoing project of mine has invoked collective intelligence in the form of community driven data sets. So I did a collaboration training a model to perform coffee reading divination. The collaborators included Dahlia Elsayed, Andrew Demirjian, and Danny Snelson, among many others. The model was trained on data sets that were generated by coffee readings I conducted with SWANA artists and activists and scholars here in Los Angeles and the oral history interviews that I conducted alongside those that became the basis for these future predictive outputs that were generated by the model, which were not generated live, but instead scripted in advance based on those data sets. So the question that this project was asking was, what would it look like to replace algorithmically generated futures that are rooted in Western techno science. What would it look like to replace hierarchical structures governed by techno elites with collective practices of knowledge making, world making, and future making, particularly in moments of extreme crisis?

Joyce: This is in line with something I brought up before. In relation to working under a landscape of crisis, this idea of collective intelligence has formulated itself through ways of adapting and readjusting to the total collapse of certain specific systems or infrastructures. I’m still processing how I can think through that question a bit more deeply beyond the idea of navigating corruption on a collective level. But I do think that it is, in some ways, a bridge toward reaching some sort of conscious or unconscious refusal to categorize or capture intelligence under this monolithic, Western centric canon. I think everyone here is interested in these alternative forms or definitions, and ways of situating […] a position toward refusal. At least, that’s how I read it.