Photo by Rea Tajiri
Nora N. Khan is a writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research specifically focuses on experimental art and music practices that make arguments through software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media; she teaches graduate students critical theory and artistic research, critical writing both for artists and designers, and history of digital media. She is a longtime editor at Rhizome, and is currently an editor of The Force of Art, along with Carin Kuoni and Serubiri Moses. This year, as The Shed’s first guest curator, she organized the exhibition Manual Override, focused on contemporary artists engaging and critiquing emerging technology. The exhibition features newly commissioned installations by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, and Morehshin Allahyari, and works by Martine Syms and Simon Fujiwara.
Her writing has been supported by many awards over the last decade, including, most recently, a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation (2018), an Eyebeam Research Residency (2017), and a Thoma Foundation 2016 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art. She studied literature and fiction writing at Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her most recent short book on machine-driven photography and vision, Seeing, Naming, Knowing, was published through The Brooklyn Rail. She wrote a book with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017), on early fan forum culture and online conspiracy theories.
She publishes in Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, 4Columns, Brooklyn Rail, Rhizome, California Sunday, Spike Art, The Village Voice, and Glass Bead, and has written commissioned essays for major exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, the Venice Biennale – Estonian Pavilion, Centre Pompidou, Swiss Institute, and Kunstverein in Hamburg. Book contributions include Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On (Koenig Books), Katja Novitskova’s Dawn Mission (Mousse) and If Only You Could See What I See with Your Eyes* (Sternberg Press), and Ian Cheng’s Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Koenig Books).
Her research and writing practice also extends to a large range of artistic collaborations, which include librettos, performances, and exhibition essays, and scripts. Last year, she collaborated with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist to create a tiny house, a garden, a film, a library, and a kiln, in A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN at Performance Space, New York.