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.

A multi-platform research program, Matter of Intelligence, explores the origins, manifestations, and implications of intelligence across species, systems, and societies through art and critical inquiry. Matter of Intelligence considers intelligence not just as an abstract concept, but as something that manifests with tangible, material implications—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. 

The Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series—comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027—is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective inquiry. The seminars, alongside other VLC programs and initiatives, aim to question, rethink, and unsettle received notions of what intelligence is, what it does, and what it might yet become. Each seminar examines how intelligence is defined, expressed, and mobilized across various domains, including biological, social, technological, ecological, institutional, historical, and others. 

In a moment defined by the speculative promises of artificial intelligence and the pervasive undoing of intellectual life, these exchanges proposition and respond to emerging urgencies, shifting perspectives, and diverse modes of 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.

The Matter of Intelligence seminars are generously supported by The James Howell Foundation. The seminars are part of the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy series established by Vera G. List, and are organized by Eriola Pira and Carin Kuoni.

Seminar 1: Paying Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of the Intellectual
Monday, September 29, 2025
6:30–8 pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, The New School
63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York

Seminar 1 convenes cross-disciplinary New School faculty—Omri Boehm, Simon Critchley, Camonghne Felix, Sean Jacobs, Natasha Lennard, Ethan Philbrick, and Cresa Pugh—to reflect on the notion of the public intellectual—its histories and internal contradictions, the shifting roles it has played in public life, and the possibilities it may still hold. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Carin Kuoni.

Seminar 2: Of Matter
Monday, November 10, 2025
7–8:30 pm EST
Online

How does matter think, and what does it mean to think with matter? Seminar 2 invites inquiry into the nature of matter, exploring matter—and by extension, intelligence—not simply as substance but as process, dynamic, relational, and always in formation. With Laura Tripaldi, a transdisciplinary researcher at the interface of science, technology, and speculative thinking, and Harpreet Sareen, designer, researcher, and artist. Hosted and moderated by the VLC’s Eriola Pira.

Seminar 3: Cosmic Intelligence: Water. Moves. Us.
Saturday, December 6, 2025
1–3 pm EST
Performance Space New York
150 1st Ave 4th floor, New York

Together with New School anthropologist Dana Burton, this seminar invites children ages 8–18 to explore how water connects us to the cosmos and to one another. Through interactive storytelling, art, sound, and movement, participants consider how intelligence lives in the flow of water and the connections between all living and nonliving beings. Featuring a collaborative art project and a cosmic dance party by SCRAAATCH, the sound and performance art duo of E. Jane and chukwumaa. Co-presented as part of the VLC’s Seminar Series with Performance Space New York as part of its We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids.

Seminar 4: After the Native Informant
Monday, March 23, 2026
6:30–8 pm EDT
Starr Foundation Hall, The New School
63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level, New York

Unpacking the long history of the “native informant,” a figure that once anchored ethnographic and colonial authority and continues to shape who is recognized as a knower across artistic, cultural, and academic contexts, this seminar considers the informant as a strategic role in sharing intelligence that refuses essentialization or data extraction. In conversation with VLC’s Eriola Pira, curator KJ Abudu and artists Jackson Polys and Selma Selman examine the figure of the native informant within contemporary art’s renewed desires for Indigeneity and otherness, playing with the demand for authenticity or knowledge with irony, opacity, or even misdirection.

Seminar 5: Gossip Work
Monday, April 27, 2026
6:30–8 pm EDT
Online

Gossip, like intelligence, is everywhere and nowhere. It circulates along social networks and institutional corridors, at once unverifiable and consequential. Often dismissed, gossip has been a vital mode of producing and circulating intelligence outside official channels or sharing what cannot be spoken aloud. With philosopher Karen C. Adkins, graphic designer Deborah Khodanovich, and artist and curator Lua Vollaard, we ask how gossip, rumor, and illicit knowledge operate as an intelligence system, through informal infrastructures, embodied knowledge, and fugitive social forms. 

Seminar 6: Scholars and Spies
Monday, May 11, 2026
6:30–8 pm EDT
Online

Scholars and Spies examines the intertwined histories of scholarship, research, and academia with the infrastructures and functions of intelligence services and espionage, statecraft, and empire. We explore how knowledge—its production, circulation, and authority—has been implicated in and mobilized by covert and overt forms of power. Participants to be announced.