Matter of Intelligence Seminar — Intelligence, Uncertain

If intelligence has always been a contested terrain — attributed, withheld, staged, denied — then misinformation and disinformation reveal the political dimensions of this conflict in its sharpest form. The seventh seminar in the Vera List Center's Matter of Intelligence series, which takes place in cooperation with the House of World Cultures (HKW) as part of its Uncertain Intelligences research program, is dedicated to the question of uncertainty in the context of current cultural, political and technological transformations. The program sees uncertainty as a productive starting point for thinking about existing structures of truth and credibility and their influence on forms of knowledge and reality. In doing so, it asks the question: Whose uncertainty is regarded as honest doubt and whose as an expression of insincerity?

Uncertain Intelligences Fellows Nora Al-Badri, Manuel Arturo Abreu and other speakers explore how artistic practice can react to these conditions, namely by maintaining complexity, enduring uncertainty without surrendering itself to it, and rejecting deceptive clarity without falling into relativism.