[10/29 at 4pm] Nora Khan - Asymptote: Computation, Disillusion, and Enchantment

[Devina Martinez]

Creative Technologies & Porter College present a guest lecture by Nora Khan as part of Creative Interventions: A Colloquium in Contemporary Media.

Asymptote: Computation, Disillusion, and Enchantment

Khan explores our personal relationships with computational systems through moments spanning from childhood gaming experiences to contemporary AI. The central metaphor of the “asymptote”—a curve endlessly approaching but never reaching a line—describes both humanity’s pursuit of technological mastery, and the incomputable aspects of experience that resist capture by algorithms and surveillance. Through encounters with drones, machine learning systems, and glitched game worlds, this talk argues for maintaining space for the mystical, ineffable, and offscreen in an era of relentless quantification and prediction. The talk ultimately calls for preserving doubt, acknowledging what cannot be computed, and remembering the personal “why” that precedes professional identity in navigating our algorithmic present.

Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles. Her writing on philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is referenced heavily across fields. Formally, this work attempts to theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and locate computation’s influence on critical language. She is currently History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc; previously she was Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts (2024-2025), and professor in Digital + Media at Rhode Island School of Design, where she was nominated for the John R. Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching (2018-2021). Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2025), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019) and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017), 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).

Date: Wednesday, October 29, 2025
Time: 4 - 5:35pm PST
Location: Online via Zoom

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