Join critic, essayist, curator, and educator Nora N. Khan as she presents a lecture on the ways technology is designed to play on evolutionary structures of belief. The talk will focus on the otherworldly mental images that comprise Pierre Huyghe: UUmwelt—visual constructions of human thought created by a deep neural network. Situating machine learning as a continuation of the efforts of film and fiction to represent consciousness, Khan considers why we choose to believe in fictional worlds and the conditions that make this belief possible.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Stuart Comer, MoMA’s Lonti Ebers Chief Curator of Media and Performance.
Nora N. Khan is an independent critic, essayist, curator, and educator. Her writing on the philosophy of AI and emerging technologies is referenced widely across fields. Formally, this work attempts to theorize the limits of algorithmic knowledge and locate computation’s influence on critical language. She is a member of the curatorial ensemble of the 2026 edition of Counterpublic, one of the nation’s largest public civic exhibitions, titled Coyote Time. She was 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. As curator of Manual Override at The Shed (2020), she worked with Sondra Perry, Morehshin Allahyari, and Lynn Hershman Leeson on new commissions, in an exhibition that featured major works by Simon Fujiwara and Martine Syms. She is currently faculty in the Creative Technologies program at University of California, Santa Cruz, and has served as Arts Council Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, in the Design Media Arts program; History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc; 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. Her books are AI Art and the Stakes for Art Criticism (2026), Seeing, Naming, Knowing (2019), and Fear Indexing the X-Files (2017, with Steven Warwick).
Accessibility
For questions about accessibility, please email [email protected].
The Ronald S. & Jo Carole Lauder entrance at 11 W 53rd Street is wheelchair accessible and has a power-assist door. Reserved and wheelchair-accessible seating is available in Titus Theater 2. Gallery stools, wheelchairs, and rollators are available by request at all Museum entrances, on a first-come, first-served basis.
Accessible and all-gender restrooms are located on the first floor and lower levels.
Guide dogs and other trained service animals are always welcome. Service animals may find relief outside of the museum through the main entrance, and free reentry is available during the event.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation is available for public programs upon request with two weeks’ advance notice. MoMA will make every effort to provide accommodation for requests made with less than two weeks’ notice. Please contact [email protected] to make a request for these services.
Major funding is provided by the Agnes Gund Education Endowment Fund for Public Programs, the Jeanne Thayer Young Scholars Fund, and the Annual Education Fund.