Nora N. Khan

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, editor, and educator. She is internationally recognized for her essays and short books, marked by a hybrid, genre-defiant prose style. Formally, this work attempts to both theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and outline the future of creative production in a technocratic age. Her notable essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence, published and reprinted in ten languages since 2015, used critique, fiction, and metaphor as strategy in contending with technological evolution. For 15 years, her writing has focused on artists’ most trenchant ideas, models of experimentation across creative fields, and critique of technological design. In particular, her work on philosophy of AI/ML, with a focus on ‘incomputable’ knowledge and the relationship of language to computation, is referenced heavily by writers, theorists, artists, and practitioners across fields.

Her book Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) focused on machine vision and generative image production. With Steven Warwick, she wrote Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information, 2017), on online conspiracy theories and fan forum culture. Forthcoming are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (Lund Humphries), The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole), and a memoir about criticism through Strange Attractor Press. She has written features and essays on Tony Conrad, Lillian Schwartz, Josh Kline, Sondra Perry, Ian Cheng, Kevin Beasley, Meriem Bennani, Casey Reas, and on in 4Columns, Rhizome, Village Voice, Flash Art, and books for Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, Centre Pompidou, and Swiss Institute. Her writing has been supported by a Critical Writing Grant given through the Visual Arts Foundation and the Crossed Purposes Foundation, the Thoma Foundation Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, and residencies at La Becque, Eyebeam, and Fogo Island Arts. 

Khan’s practice extends to a large range of long-term collaborations and ‘public epistolary’ conversations with musicians, artists, theorists, and performers. Early work with musicians on PAN - including Steven Warwick, Lars TCF Holdhus, and label founder Bill Kouligas - created a foundation. She co-wrote essays with theorist, musician, and critic DeForrest Brown, Jr. from 2014 to 2018. She created: a libretto for Kouligas’ 2018 opera Decession with Spiros Hadjidjanos and sung by Pan Daijing at Volksbuhne Berlin; a virtual influencer with Sam Rolfes/Team Rolfes for Unsound Festival, and has ghostwritten many performance scripts. Her 2018 collaboration A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRN with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist resulted in a tiny house, a garden, a film, and a library at Performance Space, New York.

Khan is sought out for her work with artists developing experimental, demanding projects. She was the Co-Curator with Andrea Bellini of the Biennale de L’Image en Mouvement 2024, A Cosmic Movie Camera, hosted by Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève. The edition was the highest-attended in the biennale’s history, and featured all new commissions by Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, American Artist, Interspecifics, Alfatih, Shuang Li, Diego Marcon, Lawrence Lek, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Sheila Chukwulozie, Emmanuel van der Auwera, Formafantasma, Aziz Hazara, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Sahej Rahal, and Jenna Sutela. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed in New York City in 2020, she worked with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. Manual Override saw 30,000 visitors in 2 months.

Khan’s practice extends on to teaching, mentorship, public speaking, and continual development of para-institutional learning spaces around the world. Khan was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was a professor in Digital + Media from 2018 to 2021. With Maya Indira Ganesh she created AI Anarchies, “Experiments in Study, Collective Learning and Unlearning,” a school, a conference, and a gathering over a week in Berlin at Akademie der Künste around the concept of an ‘anarchic AI.’ Speakers included Heba Amin, Laura Forlano, Jackie Wang, Johanna Hedva, and Hito Steyerl, and gathered fellows from all over the world for a rich seven days of debate and workshops. She was a longtime editor (2014-2021) at Rhizome, served as guest editor of HOLO, producing the well-received Mirror Stage; Between Computability and its Opposite (2021), and as Editor-in-Residence at Topical Cream, commissioning essays by writers like Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Mandy Harris Williams, Johanna Hedva, and Anaïs Duplan under the frame ‘Experimental Models’.