The Matter of Intelligence Are.na is a research and publishing channel of the Vera List Center’s two-year Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. It collects and shares the curatorial ideas, questions, and research framework guiding the Center’s inquiry and the programs and initiatives developing throughout this period. 

The channel is an iterative and continually expanding constellation of materials—spanning from academic texts, artworks, to CIA Twitter posts, whether directly or obliquely related to intelligence—connected and activated across the VLC’s programmatic strands. Like the knowledge it holds, it resists closure. This is not the tidy archive of a resolved inquiry, but a visible record of thinking-in-progress—where patterns emerge, collapse, and reconfigure. Over time, the act of hoarding ideas here may seem overwhelming, even directionless. Perhaps that is the point: to confront the paradox of intelligence today, where abundance and disorder are inseparable, and meaning emerges only through active engagement.

Are.na’s rhizomatic structure mirrors the very nature of intelligence: sprawling, interconnected, sometimes chaotic.  It also reflects the ethos of Matter of Intelligence, grounded in a commitment to shared learning, collaborative research, the co-creation of knowledge, and an embodiment of collective intelligence. 

We invite you to engage in whatever way suits you: rummage through the whole collection, explore a single channel in depth, draw connections between our channels and your own, or simply start here and follow the threads of research and curiosity wherever they may lead. Each connection you make reshapes the map for everyone else, creating a terrain as nonlinear and unpredictable as intelligence itself.