Saturday, September 25, 2021; 11am PST
40 minute talk followed by 30 minutes of public debate broadcast live at thelab.org
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Nora Khan and Fred Turner revisit their conversation around myths of neutrality, nudge architecture, and the politics of engineering from 2018, Silicon Valley Thinks Politics Doesn't Exist. In the light of the past year, what strains of technological benevolence are at play? What's intensified? The two will take up these questions in a deeper discussion of Turner's newest book with Mary Beth Meehan, Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America, on the infrastructural and social realities that are unfolding in the wake of decades of Silicon Valley's innovations.
Nora N. Khan is an editor, curator, and writer of criticism on digital visual culture and philosophy of emerging technology. Her research focuses on art, music, and literature made with and about software, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Her practice extends to a wide span of artistic collaborations, producing things like scripts, librettos, and a tiny house. Her short books are Seeing, Naming, Knowing (Brooklyn Rail, 2019) on the logic of machine vision, and co-written with Steven Warwick, Fear Indexing the X-Files (Primary Information). Forthcoming are The Artificial and the Real (Art Metropole) on simulation and semantic mapping, and a book on the stakes posed by AI Art for art criticism, through Lund Humphries. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed (NY) in 2020, she worked closely with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that also featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. She frequently publishes prose and criticism, in essays for publications like Artforum and Art in America. She is currently editor of both Topical Cream, focusing on supporting GNC and BIPOC critics, and HOLO magazine, and has been a longtime editor (2014- ) at Rhizome. From 2018-2021, she was a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, in Digital + Media, teaching critical theory and artistic research, experimental writing for artists and designers, and technological criticism.
Fred Turner is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. He is the author or co-author of five books: Seeing Silicon Valley: Life inside a Fraying America (with Mary Beth Meehan); L’Usage de L’Art dans la Silicon Valley; The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties; From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism; and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory. Before coming to Stanford, he taught Communication at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He also worked for ten years as a journalist. He has written for newspapers and magazines ranging from the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine to Harper’s.
The Forum is an experiment in creating discourse within the context of isolation. Art creates a space for reconsidering our knowledge across various social and professional fields. It asks us: Why do we perceive things the way we do? What are we living for? How can we reimagine our relationships to the human and non-human world? The Forum proposes that the project of freedom is a project of making a world with others. So, we invite you to help us answer: what can we do now?
Please bring your ideas, proposals, questions to discuss following the talk.
Image of Nora Khan by Lyndsy Welgos, image of Fred Turner by Mareike Foecking