Hello everyone! After my long summer break, Urgent Futures is back! And we’re kicking things off with a banger.
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guest this week is Nora Khan.
Nora N. Khan (
) is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, where last year she served as Arts Council Professor at UCLA in Design Media Arts. 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. 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).What language should we use for our experience of the technological? There’s so much chatter about AI, and yet so often it’s framed by a language inherited from science and technology. Given technology’s cultural and societal implications, we need thoughtful folks in the arts and humanities creating linguistic interventions and modes of understanding
Which is why I was so delighted to host Nora—a writer, critic, curator, and educator whose work moves fluidly across fields to make sense of how technology reshapes culture, thought, and possibility. She’s one of the sharpest interpreters of algorithmic systems and the ways they mediate reality, but what makes her writing distinct is that it’s also deeply imaginative, poetic, and alive to the weird, the magical, the un- and not-yet-articulated.
In this conversation, we discuss the problem of language—how the words we have for technology shape the way we see it, the way it appears and disappears before us, and the way we might invent new vocabularies to better describe the experiences of living with massive computational systems. We talk about criticism as both a political and creative act—not just diagnosing the limits of AI, games, and simulations, but holding onto the possibility of what they could be if thought otherwise. We touch on the myths and misconceptions around AI and AI art, the stakes of criticism in a world increasingly mediated by prediction and simulation, and what it means to develop metaphors that can carry us beyond 20th century categories into the messy realities of the 21st.
In the process, we explore how transdisciplinary practice evolves over time, and how living with and through technology requires us to constantly reimagine the terms of our own thought. So please enjoy this rich, illuminating conversation with Nora Khan.
Another episode you might like:
Minna Salami: Can Feminism Be African? | #45
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
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Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with critic and theorist Mike Pepi:
