Fear Indexing the X-Files / Primary Information
Book written in collaboration with artist Steven Warwick, and published by the fantastic Primary Information, which has printed artist’s books for the past decade. Fear Indexing examines the fears that occurred as themes in the X-Files television
series — which ran from 1992 to 2002. There are nice reviews from VICE, AQNB, and Artistsbooksandmultiples.
From the description: “Khan and Warwick take this fear index and link it to the rise of
the World Wide Web and the global internet, which emerged in the same era. As
the show developed, its characters became more adept at using the internet, as did
its fans, many of whom visited chat rooms and dedicated forums to discuss episode
content, speculate on theories, and come up with urban legends of their own. This
behavior provides a through line to the present, as conspiracy theories discussed on
those vanguard message boards eerily echo today’s fake news stories perpetuated
by the alt-right.”
If Only You Could See What I’ve Seen With Your Eyes / Sternberg Press
JULY 2017
On the occasion of representing Estonia in the Venice Biennale (Estonian Pavilion at
the 57th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia), Katja Novitskova
published a book of essays through Sternberg Press, If Only You Could See What I’ve
Seen with Your Eyes. The book “addresses the relationship between the domain of
seeing, big data-driven industries, and ecology in times of biotic crisis.” I contributed
an anchor essay, “Moving Past Eyelessness,” first commissioned by Maria Arusoo,
Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia. Texts by Kati Ilves, Jaak Tomberg, Toke
Lykkeberg, and Venus Lau.
Dawn Mission / Mousse Publishing
SUMMER 2016
Wrote a series of fictional texts for artist’s book by Katja Novitskova to be
published by Mousse Publishing. The texts revolve around and respond to
Novitskova’s solo exhibition, Dawn Mission, at Kunstverein in Hamburg. The
artworks revolve around visual data processing and its frontier terrains: on the
deep-sea floor, at the surface of Mars, from nightlife cameras in savannah state
parks. My role was to create fiction about this engagement with machine
production of aesthetic material, as it generates novel pattern recognition and
modes of seeing. Novitskova will represent Estonia at the Venice Biennale, and her
website is linked here.
Nora N. Khan 