Seminar
Seminar 3: Cosmic Intelligence: Water. Moves. Us.
Dec 6, 2025
1:00–3:00pm ET
Performance Space New York
150 1st Ave 4th floor, New York, NY 10009
FREE for everybody under 18 and those who accompany them.
The water that fills our oceans also flows through our bodies—and across distant stars and planets. Moving through us and around us, water shapes how we live, sense, and imagine. What if water could teach us how to think, feel, and know?
Together with anthropologist Dana Burton, children ages 8–18 will dive into how water connects us to the cosmos and to one another. Through interactive storytelling, art, sound, and movement, participants will explore how microbes survive in deserts, how tides rise and fall with the Moon, and how comets brought water across the solar system—discovering that intelligence, or the ways we sense and understand the world, lives in the flow of water, the rhythm of tides, and the connections between all living and nonliving beings.
The afternoon concludes with a collaborative art project and a cosmic dance party, celebrating our shared, watery connection to the universe and our understanding of it.
Water. Moves. Us., co-presented by Performance Space New York as part of the We The Youth: Keith Haring Lecture for Kids and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics as part of the Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series explores the possibility that intelligence is not only of the mind, but emerges through planetary, cosmic, relational, and distributed systems—woven into the very dynamics that shape existence across scale.
We the Youth – Keith Haring Lecture Series invites children and their friends and families to meet luminaries who talk about ideas and social issues that are often left off of school curriculums. This series is supported by The Keith Haring Foundation in honor of Keith Haring who collaborated with children throughout his life and believed in art’s ability to create a more accepting society.
Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
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. Comprising twelve sessions convened from September 2025 through May 2027—the Seminar Series is conceived as an open curriculum and a site for collective 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 presented as part of the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy series and are organized by Eriola Pira and Carin Kuoni.
The Fall 2025 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, members of Vera’s List and The VLC Producers Council, and the following institutional funders:
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Boris Lurie Art Foundation
Mellon Foundation
The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature
We also gratefully acknowledge the support of The New School, our academic home.
Related
Seminar Overview
Matter of Intelligence Seminar Series
Sep 29, 2025–May 29, 2026
Guide, Reading List, Research
Matter of Intelligence Are.na Channel
Seminar
Seminar 1: Paying Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of the Intellectual
Sep 29, 2025
Seminar
Seminar 2: Of Matter
