Art Metropole

03 Aug. 2019

Artist Talk - The Islands' Writer-in-Residence Nora Khan

Speaker

Nora N. Khan

Time

1pm

Join us on Saturday August 3rd 2019 at 1pm for an artist talk with The Islands Writer-in-Residence Nora Khan. 

For her talk, Nora will speak around the short book she is writing as part of the Islands Arts Writing Residency, titled ‘The Artificial and the Real.’ Themes include: alternative living communities poetry of simulation and artifice, semantic maps, synthetic metaphors, and Turpin’s Trail, where she led a mapping workshop to close her writing and research on Fogo Island.

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 editor of Prototype, the forthcoming book of Google’s Artist and Machine Intelligence Group.

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, Frieze, 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. In 2020, she is a guest curator at The Shed, of the exhibition Manual Override, featuring commissions by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Martine Syms, and Simon Fujiwara.

Image credit: Leo Castaneda

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 editor of Prototype, the forthcoming book of Google’s Artist and Machine Intelligence Group.

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, Frieze, 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. In 2020, she is a guest curator at The Shed, of the exhibition Manual Override, featuring commissions by Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, Martine Syms, and Simon Fujiwara.

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