Nora N. Khan

A running list of all talks and chats:

2018

March: Serpentine Galleries, London
In Conversation with Ian Cheng and Ben Vickers.

March: LIMA Amsterdam
In Conversation with Harm van den Dorpel at Cultural Matter, the exhibition series done by LIMA Amsterdam.

January: DLD Conference in  Munich, Germany
Scale Up To the Sublime with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Documentation Here.

2017

December: No Commission: Miami
“The Future of Creativity” panel with Anne Pasternak, Kimberly Drew, Virgil Abloh, Swizz Beatz, and Carmen Aguilar y Wedge.

November: LAMPO in Chicago
Fear Indexing the X-Files with Steven Warwick. Lecture-performance reading from our book.

November: Lecture at The New School
Gave a Guest Lecture to the MFA Design and Technology students at New School/Parsons in Ed Keller and Melanie Crean’s Design for This Century course.

October: Printed Matter
Fear Indexing the X-Files Book Launch with Steven Warwick and Alexander Iadarola.

June: Triple Canopy
Chatbot Laureate with Lucy Ives and Alexandra Kleeman at Triple Canopy.
Description: “The Amme Talks is a conversation between a writer and a milk-spilling chatbot who promises to liberate speech (and revolutionize poetry) via words that refer to nothing but themselves. To mark the publication of the book (as a paperback and ebook), novelist and former Triple Canopy editor Lucy Ives will speak with fellow writers Alexandra Kleeman and Nora Khan, both of whom have investigated artificial intelligence, dumb machines, and the progress of human and robotic expression. They’ll consider what kind of poetry can be made by programs, and whether the inventiveness of software has anything to do with the Turing test.” Documentation Here

March 11 at UCLA
Machines of Loving Grace: A Symposium on Architecture, AI, and Virtual Worlds
Hosted by IDEAS, the UCLA A.UD Department’s Incubator, and Ozel Suprastudio, run by lead faculty Guvenc Ozel.
PARTICIPANTS: Rebecca Allen (Professor, UCLA Design Media Arts), Tim Wantland (Senior Interaction Designer, Google Research Machine Intelligence), Benjamin Bratton (Professor, University of California, San Diego), Madeline Gannon (Founder & Principal Researcher, ATONATON), Jason Kelly Johnson (Co-Founder and Design Partner – Future Cities Lab), Nora Khan (Writer, Eyebeam, Rhizome), Kenric Mcdowell (Senior UX Designer, Google Research, Art and Machine Intelligence), Guvenc Ozel (Lead Faculty, UCLA A.UD Suprastudio, IDEAS Program Advisor), Casey Reas (Professor, UCLA Design Media Arts), Jose Sanchez (Assistant Professor University of Southern California, School of Architecture, Director at Plethora Project llc.)

March 6th at New School
Acid Architecture: Trans-Thinking in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism
Organized by Warren Neidich and the Office of Aesthetic Occupation in collaboration with CTM / Ed Keller.

4.30 PM – 8.30 PM
Kellen Auditorium, The New School
Center for Transformative Media
PARTICIPANTS: Ed Keller, Nora Khan, Sanford Kwinter, Warren Neidich, and McKenzie Wark.

March 2017: New York University, IDM Graduate Colloquium Lecture Series. Spoke to graduate students of Christian Howard at NYU Tandon School of Engineering; gave a 50-minute talk titled “Seeing Like Machines, Thinking Like Machines.”

The talk folded in notes from previous talks this year and also covered the basics of my evolving research on narrative engineering at Eyebeam.

February 2017: transmediale, Berlin (documentation coming)

February 2017: CTM, Berlin (documentation coming)

February 2017: Speaker on AI and narrative chatbot design at Pomegranate, morning salon series for women in creative technology, held at the Whitney Museum. Presentations are made; the group gives “women support, critical insight and feedback on their respective explorations.” The group critique was awesome and I so highly recommend this series.

2016

November 2016: New Ways to See: Digital Art Criticism Now: Spoke at the Whitney about Ian Cheng’s live simulations and then took part in a discussion with Christiane Paul, artists Clement Valla and Ian Cheng, moderated by Brian Droitcour. Link to Stream

December 2016: At New Museum, helped produce and moderate Together in Electric Dreams, a session on the present and future of artificial intelligence within Open Score, an art and technology symposium. Panelists included Sondra Perry, Ian Cheng, Katherine Cross, and Patricia Reed. Video Documentation

December 2016: Participated in Eyebeam’s Fed Up!, a conversation on social media and democracy with Eyebeam alums and residents and invited guests: Mike Rugnetta, Margarita Noriega, Caroline Sinders, Mushon Zer-Aviv

December 2016: Participated in panel at Printed Matter for the launch of Morehshin Allahyari and Daniel Rourke’s wondrous 3D Additivist Cookbook

September 2016: Spoke briefly at first New York edition of Bay Area-born Living Room Light Exchange with Jan Robert Leegte and Robert Yang.

2015

November//Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City: Åzone Summit

As part of the opening wave of introduction of the Åzone Futures Market exhibition, I participated with a bunch of fellow contributors in the Åzone Summit, held at the Guggenhem in November. Spoke on a Diakron-moderated panel with Marvin Jordan (DIS Magazine), Rob Giampietro (Head of Google Design), and Marina Otero (Het Nieuwe Instituut). We talked with the incredibly thoughtful and generative Aslak Aamot Kjærulff, a researcher with Diakron.

We tried to cover the theoretical questions that developing the exhibition has sparked, along with the responsibilities of a traditional institution in fostering radical and liminal ideas, and finally, the purpose of hosting a live, abstract prediction market. Lots of questions opened up over the course of a somewhat grueling day. More are left to be answered; I’ll be covering the experience of working on Åzone in more depth in a blog post.

September//Protein Studios, Shoreditch, London, United Kingdom: Launch of After Us Magazine

This was the fifth installation of the dotdotdot party series, and the launch of After Us was part of the event. I was there in part to support the magazine. It was a pleasure to see editor Manuel Sepulveda and to meet the other contributors, who I’d been in contact with only digitally for much of 2015. Further, I’ve loved watching this magazine take shape over the course of this year, from March until now. I was slated to speak with Benedict Singleton and Lawrence, with a short summary of my essay ‘Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence.’

But only in spirit, I did this! Alas! After a massive and heartbreaking flight delay, I entered the event just as our panel started, somewhat stunned, and with my essay crumpled and folded a dozen times in my hands. The picture here from the event shows the print magazine, stacked, and apparently in right under the wire. It looked beautiful and people gave great feedback then, and since. Writing almost never ends in a party, but this time, it did.

March//Porter Square Books, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Force of What’s Possible Panel

Spoke with Jackie Wang, Lily Hoang, Michael Stewart and Annie Won on a small panel for the publication of the anthology The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. This beautiful book is edited by Lily Hoang and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and was published by Nightboat in Brooklyn.

I read a little bit of Lynne Tillman’s passage in the book (as she’s my favorite experimental fiction writer), talked about fiction writers’ struggle to be experimental, and then read from Faulty Inventory Control.

February//EMW Bookstore, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Tech & Ethics Salon

For the monthly EMW Tech & Ethics Salon themed ‘Love & Relationships,’ I joined Christine An and Jackie Wang. The themes were: technology-mediated relationships, mechanization of social interactions, and transcending human relationships. I talked about famous and hilarious examples of objectophilia.

2013

November//Windsor House, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Literary Salon 

Read a short story, Cardinal, published in Conjunctions’ Fall 2013 issue, as part of a literary salon organized by Christine An. Read alongside Elizabeth Watkins, who presented her newest video installation.