Conversation

Conversations with the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows and Special Guests at the VLC Forum 2025 introduces the Matter of Intelligence fellows—Moriah Evans, Mashinka Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika— offering a first public glimpse into their unfolding fellowship projects. Across four lively conversations, the Fellows are joined by artists, scholars, and curators to explore intelligence in all its forms—how it is measured, experienced in the body, cultivated within communities, and shared across people, species, and technologies—while rethinking what it means to know, sense, and imagine in a world shaped by history, culture, and technology.

12 pm Calibrated Intelligence: Joyce Joumaa and Meredith Broussard 

2025–2027 VLC Fellow Joyce Joumaa and data journalist Meredith Broussard explore the historical and ongoing entanglements of intelligence testing, racial classification, and technological control. Taking Joumaa’s fellowship research into early IQ testing at Ellis Island as a point of departure, their dialogue traces how intelligence has been “calibrated” through systems built to sort, exclude, and hierarchize human life. From early 20th-century eugenics to contemporary algorithmic bias, they interrogate the myth of technological neutrality and examine how what Broussard has termed “technochauvinist” systems continue to reinforce structural inequality—and how such systems might be challenged or reimagined through artistic, documentary, and critical practices.

1 pm Lunch

2 pm Embodied Intelligences: Moriah Evans and André Lepecki 

2025–2027 VLC Fellow Moriah Evans is joined by writer, curator, and dramaturg André Lepecki in an exploration of the body as both a social and intelligent agent. Together, they delve into the ways in which knowledge embedded in our bodies enriches our understanding of one another. Acknowledging that intelligence is informed by biomechanical processes alongside social and political contexts, they reflect on how this embodied intelligence influences what we can sense, how we perceive, and what we envision as possible. Evans’s choreographic practice and Lepecki’s scholarship on choreopolitics provide the framework for a conversation that unpacks the complex interplay of biomechanical, social, and political forces that shape perception and belief, movement, and action.

3 pm Liberatory Intelligence: Mashinka Hakopian and Catherine D’Ignazio

2025–2027 VLC Fellow Mashinka Hakopian and scholar-artist Catherine D’Ignazio gather around the idea of liberatory intelligence: ways of knowing born from ancestry, shaped in community, and sustained through care. They consider how such forms of intelligence resist the erasure of non-Western epistemologies and push back against the forces of digital colonialism and technocapitalism. Building on their work in ancestral intelligence and feminist data science, they highlight practices of cultural preservation, community-built datasets, and grassroots knowledge-making that challenge algorithmic control and imagine more just futures.

4 pm Entangled Intelligences: Kira Xonorika and Tiara Roxanne 

2025-2027 VLC Fellow Kira Xonorika and scholar-artist Dr. Tiara Roxanne explore entangled notions of intelligence, centering Indigenous epistemologies, ancestral knowledge systems, sociotechnical hauntologies, and speculative worldbuilding. Drawing from their respective practices in cyberfeminist critique, performance, generative art, and Two-Spirit futurity, they consider how intelligence might be understood not as a metric of mastery, but as a relational force—emergent across species, technologies, and cosmologies.