2016 Recipients: Christiane Paul & Nora Khan

THE 2016 ARTS WRITING AWARDS RECIPIENTS

Christiane Paul received the $40,000 award ($30,000 award plus the opportunity for a $10,000 project grant) for an established arts writer in the U.S. who has made significant contributions to writing about digital art. Christiane Paul is Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Associate Professor and Associate Dean in the School of Media Studies at The New School, New York City. Her work – including her recently published book A Companion to Digital Art – aims to historically bridge diverse communities in the field while placing digital art in a larger art historical context. She has authored and edited four books and written more than 100 articles that have been published in anthologies and magazines such as Artforum, Frieze and Artpulse.

Nora Khan received the $20,000 award ($15,000 award plus the opportunity for a $5,000 project grant) for an emerging arts writer in the U.S. who demonstrates great promise in writing about digital art. Nora Khan is a writer and editor, and currently contributing editor at Rhizome. She writes fiction and creative essays about digital visual culture, the poetics of artificial superintelligence, the hidden affective life of Facebook emoji; belief in games; intelligent personal agents built on ambient neural learning systems; and the use of simulations to critique neoliberalism. Her writing has been published in Rhizome, Kill Screen, Conjunctions, After Us, AVANT, DIS Magazine and American Literary Review. She was a contributing critic to the Guggenheim’s Åzone Futures Market exhibition and co-managed Futures Along the Blockchain, a Rhizome fall commission.Read more about the 2016 Arts Writing Awards recipients.

“NEW WAYS TO SEE: DIGITAL ART CRITICISM NOW”

On November 29, 2016 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Christiane Paul and Nora Khan discuss current issues in digital art with Ian Cheng and Clement Valla, two artists on whose work they have written. Paul, Khan and the artists talk about topics explored in their respective writings and projects, with a focus on the ways in which networked technologies and computation shape and place productive pressure on creative expression. They will also discuss challenges inherent in writing about digital art, and will address the ways in which both artists would like to see their work – and digital practices as a whole – represented and analyzed in arts publications. The discussion is moderated by Brian Droitcour, Associate Editor at Art in America.

Read more about “New Ways to See: Digital Art Criticism Now”.