Where does intelligence start? Where does it reside? What forms does it take? Does it even exist? 

With new advances in artificial intelligence, these and other questions about intelligence and intelligent life are increasingly being asked, with a sense of urgency, as the promise and threats of AI loom large. For four semesters, we will tackle these questions and pose new ones that emerge from our engagement with intelligence—distinguishing it from consciousness and sentience—as perception, capacity, knowledge, and wisdom across species and places and over time. While definitions and theories about the nature of intelligence are hard to pin down, even among philosophers and psychologists—with many arguing it is a social construct that reproduces classicist, racist, and ableist hierarchies—it is its colloquial pervasiveness and currency as a concept that we are most concerned with.

Along with intelligence’s common derivatives and doublets—intel, intellect, intellectual, intellectualize, and intelligentsia—we chart its usage across more obscure, seemingly unrelated frameworks, from intellectual property and intelligence agencies to intelligent design. With intelligence as a lens, we examine how knowledge and power are intertwined and how epistemic tools are wielded to influence, control, favor, and subjugate. Invariably, these discussions encompass testing and standards of cognitive performance, arbitrary hierarchies of intellectual ability and superiority—bound with eugenics, ableism, racism, and cissexism. Against this biopolitical notion of intelligence, there are other forms of intelligence rooted in more experiential, communal, and just ways of being and knowing in the world, from Indigenous and spiritual epistemologies to those we associate with our nonhuman kin. 

Matter of Intelligence approaches intelligence as a subject of inquiry with tangible, material implications. It considers intelligence not just as an abstract concept but as something that manifests—whether through human cognition, natural processes, or artificial systems—and actively shapes and impacts our understanding and relations with the immaterial and physical worlds. In an echo of its etymological roots in legere (Latin, to collect), two years of Matter of Intelligence at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics brings together and links different forms of intelligence, of being and knowing. Art provides the transdisciplinary lens for this expansive consideration of intelligence and its multiple manifestations, including art itself as intelligence and an intellectual activity. 

Each Biennial Focus appoints a new VLC Fellowship Cohort based on submissions to an open call or by nomination. The 2025–2027 Focus Theme: Matter of Intelligence Open Call accepts applications through January 6, 2025.