Christensen Distinguished Lecture: Nora N. Khan

The Department of Art and Art History's Christensen Distinguished Lecture Series presents Nora N. Khan, Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts, who will give a talk titled, "On Discernment."

Images persuade us, demand of us, and need things from us, as W.J.T. Mitchell wrote in his seminal What Do Pictures Want? over 20 years ago. Today’s images want, desire, and demand more from us than ever before; they are rowdy, animated, with unruly drive, designed by many hands beyond the frame. Looking across the landscape of synthetic and generative images, and strange moments in mass media, visual art, and literature, ‘On Discernment’ invites us to consider what generative images, and algorithmic culture, want from us. How can the critical impulse evolve to answer these images’ demands? Drawing on her practice as a critic, educator, and curator, Khan explores how criticism might move with 'intelligent-seeming' systems and beings that simulate liveness and likeness.

This lecture probes generative visual culture to suggest what ancient dreams these images seem to fulfill and what new kinds of iconoclasm are being built. To navigate a present and future dominated by synthetic media, and created by predictive systems, we might take up a practice of seeing through systems. We swiftly explore the craft of developing a hybrid, strategic, collective and dissident criticism of technology. We will review cases of baffling, seemingly inarticulable experiences from early software experiments and contemporary artists' interventions, into use of AI/ML and emerging technologies. Finally, we hope to argue for the needed evolution of contemporary critical language in response to material and symbolic systems that dramatically shape our creative approaches and cognition. Evolving critical methods may help us better situate ourselves to identify a vast range of hidden fictions and beliefs about what technology is meant to do and be for us.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, where she is currently Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. Her notable essay Towards a Poetics of Artificial Superintelligence, published and reprinted in ten languages since 2015, uses 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 widely across fields.

Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), co-written with Steven Warwick. She is a member of the Curatorial Ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, focused next on ‘Near Futures’. 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, and also curated Manual Override at The Shed (2020).

Khan 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. 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 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.

This lecture is made possible by a generous grant from Carmen M. Christensen.

Image: Jules Bastien-Lepage, Joan of Arc, 1879, oil on canvas, 254 × 279.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain image.

VISITOR INFORMATION

This event is open to Stanford affiliates and the general public. Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating. Admission is free.

Oshman Hall is located within the McMurtry Building on Stanford campus at 355 Roth Way. Visitor parking is available in designated areas and is free after 4pm on weekdays. Alternatively, take the Caltrain to Palo Alto Transit Center and hop on the free Stanford Marguerite Shuttle. If you need a disability-related accommodation or wheelchair access information, please contact Julianne Garcia at [email protected].

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