The Artificial and the Real

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 and a longtime editor at Rhizome, She 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. Her talk will focus on Silicon Valley ideology, the history of counterculture in design of technology, and how that manifests in criticism and writing about art using software.