Nora Khan

Nora N. Khan writes criticism on emerging issues within digital visual culture, experimental art and music practices, and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research focuses on experimental art and music practices that make arguments through software.She is a professor at RISD, Digital and Media, where 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. In 2020, she is a guest curator at The Shed, for the exhibition Manual Override, featuring Lynn Hershman Leeson, Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, 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 for an emerging arts writer. She has published in 4Columns, Rhizome, Art in America, Flash Art, Mousse, California Sunday, Spike Art, The Village Voice, Glass Bead and many other places. She has contributed commissioned essays for exhibitions at Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Gallery, the Venice Biennale, and Kunstverein in Hamburg and in a number of artist’s books, including Sondra Perry’s Typhoon Coming On (Koenig), Katja Novitskova’s Dawn Mission (Mousse) and If Only You Could See What I See with Your Eyes*(Sternberg), and Ian Cheng’s Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Koenig). 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 most recent work, Seeing, Naming, Knowing, is available as a special publication within The Brooklyn Rail, April 2019. Her research and writing practice extends to a large range of collaborations, which include shows, performances, and exhibition essays, scripts, and sometimes, librettos. Last year, she collaborated with Sondra Perry, Caitlin Cherry, and American Artist to create A Wild Ass Beyond: ApocalypseRNat Performance Space, New York.