What commits us, and what joins us? In its 21st year – as our planet enters the Age of the Anthropocene, where everything is infused by human activity – the Vera List Center embarks on an extended investigation of Alignment, usually referred to as the “proper or desirable relation of components.” With distinctions blurring between nature and culture, individual and group, and political and economic spheres, we will explore how alignments take place, and why. Art will provide the transdisciplinary lens for this examination.

Over the next two years, the center will address the formation of alignments in science, law, and politics and, in so doing, will ask where correspondences are sought and found, and how individual entities relate to larger bodies. Such discussions will invariably encompass those about democracy and the newly emerging regimes in the Arab world; those about purpose and usefulness – ethically, politically, and otherwise – and whether intentional communities can be defined through notions of alignment; those about entitlement and rights; about theory and practice; and those on the space of alignments, and how the term might be applicable to an enhanced definition of civic space. Alignments, or correspondences, require translation, and with it a reflection on language, interdisciplinarity and cognition. They can be organic and artificial, accidental and constructed, permanent and transitional.

We propose Alignment as the term that supports an expanded, comprehensive examination of how the parts of this world fit together, how they will be in a symbiotic position to one another, to a limited extent, for a limited time. Art enables such an examination.