Sprecherin: Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern
Inhaberin der Professur
NameProf. Dr. Orit Halpern
Eine verschlüsselte E-Mail über das SecureMail-Portal versenden (nur für TUD-externe Personen).
Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automation, intelligence, and freedom; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.
She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, and Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her current book with Robert Mitchell (2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. The book is a genealogy of our current obsession with smart technologies and artificial intelligence.
A Project mobilizing energies Against Catastrophe
The aim of this project is to interrogate the concept of catastrophe – how it is defined, analyzed, and deployed – and anti-catastrophic practices in an attempt to envision alternatives to our present.
It does so through an edited volume, art and design commissions, and offline and online exhibitions that explore catastrophe and anti-catastrophe in practice around the globe. The focus throughout is on how novel thinking and practice in design, architecture, and technology can open possibilities for more equitably, democratically, and sustainably surviving a catastrophic world, but also expanding epistemic horizons beyond such apocalyptic thinking.
Governing through Design is a collaborative research project that investigates how design impacts society. It uses history and ethnography to develop new narratives of how the practices and epistemologies of design reconceive global politics and everyday lifeworlds, and invest in pedagogies that seek to intervene in contemporary practices of design.
It is an interdisciplinary collective of researchers based at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, the University of Basel, and Concordia University Montréal, with backgrounds in design history, urban studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, political science, and science & technology studies.