The Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence brings together interdisciplinary cultural thinkers around the subject of intelligence, exploring both its material and intangible implications. With visionary artists, curators, scholars, and technologists, the VLC Forum presents an electrifying series of talks, performances, and live broadcasts that collectively illuminate the many forms intelligence can take.

This fall marks the launch of the center’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme, Matter of Intelligence. Anchored by the VLC Fellows—Moriah Evans, Mashinka Hakopian, Joyce Joumaa, and Kira Xonorika—this year’s VLC Forum offers a first public glimpse into their unfolding fellowship projects. Each artist is joined by a special guest of their choice in dialogue or parallel inquiry.

Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli delivers the keynote lecture. The annual VLC Community Dinner explores the mind-gut axis through food, setting the stage for bold ideas, unexpected connections, and powerful new insights into the intelligence Focus Theme that will unfold over the next two years. This year’s VLC Forum also announces the recipient of the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice along with the Jane Lombard Fellows, representing the prize’s extraordinary finalists.

Programming is free and open to the public with advanced registration. Subscribe to the VLC newsletter or follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to receive up-to-date announcements.

The Vera List Center Forum 2025: Matter of Intelligence, presented as part of the VLC’s 2025–2027 Focus Theme Matter of Intelligence. It is curated by Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira in partnership with the VLC Fellows. It is convened with the support of Tabor Banquer, Re’al Christian, and Adrienne Umeh as well as Molly Ragan. 

KEYNOTE
Matteo Pasquinelli
AI and Madness: On the Disalienation of the General Intellect
Friday, October 17, 6:30–8 pm EDT
Kellen Auditorium, The New School
Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, 66 Fifth Ave, 1st floor, New York

The notion of a collective mind—or general intellect—has seduced thinkers from antiquity to the present. In recent decades, it has reemerged in debates around knowledge society and cognitive capitalism, framed as a vital site of political and artistic agency. Today, however, we face an unprecedented reality: a planetary infrastructure of data centers and AI models that both materialize and alienate this collective intelligence. In his VLC Forum 2025 keynote lecture, philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli explores this topic; David Bering-Porter, Assistant Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, offers a response.

DINNER
Community Dinner: Guts and Brains
Friday, October 17, 8–10 pm EDT
The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor, New York

This year’s VLC Community Dinner is a convivial, multisensory gathering that explores the mind-gut connection—linking thought, emotion, and digestion. Featuring coffee cup and tarot readers and other divination practitioners, the Community Dinner invites reflection on how cultures have long explored knowledge, intuition, and prediction and offers playful, poetic, embodied counterpoints to today’s AI and algorithmic logics. With appearances by Tania Khouri, Jia Sung, and DJ set by Lamin Fofana.

LECTURE PERFORMANCE
(question–repeat–failure–record)
Saturday, October 18, 11 am–12 pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall
University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level

(question–repeat–failure–record) is a choreographic lecture performance by Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez, conceived as the first chapter in their evolving inquiry into the fraught history and enduring impact of intelligence testing. Taking the test as both subject and structure, Erbacher and Estévez explore how intelligence has been constructed and instrumentalized through data, language, sound, architecture, gesture, and institutional form, revealing how such tests privilege Western rationality and exclude embodied ways of knowing.

DIALOGUES
Conversations with the 2022–2024 VLC Fellows and Special Guests
Saturday, October 18, 12–5 pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall
University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level

The newly appointed VLC Fellows are joined by invited guests of their choice in dialogue or parallel inquiry on the topic of intelligence. Featuring Joyce Joumaa and Meredith Broussard, Moriah Evans and André Lepecki, Mashinka Hakopian and Catherine D’Ignazio, and Kira Xonorika and Tiara Roxanne. Lunch will be served.

ANNOUNCEMENT & RECEPTION
Prize Announcement and Forum Closing Reception
Saturday, October 18, 5–6 pm EDT
The New School, Starr Foundation Hall
University Center, 63 Fifth Avenue, Lower Level

Closing out the VLC Forum 2025, we announce and celebrate the recipient of the 2025–2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice and the four Jane Lombard Fellows. The prize honors an artist or group of artists who has taken great risks to advance social justice in profound and visionary ways.

Launched in 2018 under the Focus Theme If Art Is Politics, the Vera List Center Forum is an annual convening of leading voices and practitioners in the field of art and politics and a signature program of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. The VLC Forum is an open invitation to approach the political expansively. It is a platform for an in-depth, collective inquiry into the VLC’s biennial Focus Themes and showcases exemplary politically engaged art practices from around the world, including those of the Vera List Center Fellows, the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice recipient, and the Jane Lombard Fellows.

From keynote lectures and conversations to exhibitions, large-scale musical productions, and publications, the VLC Forum unfolds over several days at The New School and online, gathering local and international artists, performers, scholars, activists, and policymakers, all working at the forefront of art, political imagination, and social justice. Completely free and open to all, the VLC Forum presents a unique opportunity for collective learning and community-making. Since the VLC’s 30th anniversary in 2022, a free Community Dinner anchors each VLC Forum, bringing together the politically engaged art community, near and far, all working towards just and joyous futures. The VLC Forum was established with and continues to be supported by, an endowment gift from VLC board member Jane Lombard.