Chair of Digital Cultures

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NEWS

Mar 13, 2023

Bürgerliche Kälte - Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität | Nelly Y. Pinkrah zu Gast bei Buchprämiere von von Henrike Kohpeiß | 13.3.2023 | Volksbühne Berlin

Envisioning the space of networked decision making in financial markets. Asymptote Architecture

Mar 07, 2023

Financializing Intelligence: On the Integration of Machines and Markets | Article by Orit Halpern | e-flux

Feb 27, 2023

Listening in, Sounding out: Resonances of Future Pasts | Organized by Nelly Y. Pinkrah and Michelle Pfeifer @ Hellerau | May 2023

Events, Talks, Lectures, Workshops

Mar 31 2023

“Neural ‘Freedoms’: Population, Choice, and Machine Learning” | Lecture by Brit Halpern @ UNC

Apr 7 2023

Urbanism after Data | Orit Halpern @ University of Virginia | School of Architecture

Apr 13 2023

Buchpremiere: Bürgerliche Kälte - Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität | Nelly Y. Pinkrah zu Gast bei

Apr - May 19 - 7 2023

24/7 – Final presentation by Esmeralda Conde Ruiz, Schaufler Residency@TU Dresden 2022, at HELLERAU

Apr 20 2023

Lecture "Human perception and its importance for sound design", Prof. Dr. Ercan Altinsoy

Apr 27 2023

Lecture Lecture "Sounding Space: Immersion in space, sound and music", Jun.-Prof. Matthew McGinity

Die Professur im Überblick

Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change 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.

Team

Here you can find the profiles of all team members: Nelly Yaa Pinkrah (Postdoc), Michelle Pfeifer (Postdoc), Johanna Mehl (PhD candidate), Katharina Fritzsch (Team Assistant)

Vogelperspektive der Stadt Songdo. In der Mitte ein Park, darum Hochhäuser

Research

Smart Infrastructures, Artificial Intelligence, and the Anthropocene. These three categories are unified through an investment in using humanistic inquiry to denaturalize the present and to inform the future of how we design and envision digital technologies; fostering new methods and practices at the intersection of the humanities, science, and the arts; and interrogating how computational infrastructures and artificial intelligence technologies impact race, environment, and political-economy.

Research and teaching areas of the chair for Digital Cultures focusses on the relationship between digital media, infrastructure, and governmentality.

Current Research Projects

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.

GOVERNING THROUGH DESIGN

Governing through Design is a collaborative research project that investigates how design impacts society. We use 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.

yellowed sheet of paper with a drawing of barbed wire and descriptions

Smart Borders

This project interrogates how the emergence of “smart borders” transforms possibilities of movement and articulations of identity, citizenship, belonging, and exclusion and tracks the histories of situating borders as smart or intelligent through the use of media technologies. Located at the intersections of digital media studies, critical migration and border studies and political anthropology this multi-sited, multi-modal study draws on original interview materials with software engineers, policymakers, and migrant networks and uses discourse and archival analysis to critically examine how borders are framed as intelligent.

One Million Refugees: Numbers and the Sexuality of Statistics

This project conducted by Dr. Michelle Pfeifer analyzes the sexual and gendered politics of migration data. The project interrogates how the production and circulation of numbers in refugee quotas, allocation keys, and migration statistics are central for bordering practices and are rooted in eugenicist and colonial genealogies of population control that situate migrants as a racialized threat of biological and social contagion.

The World as a Design Problem

This doctoral research offers a critical investigation of the ways in which the politics, epistemologies, and underlying assumptions that have shaped environmental design practices in the 1970s reverberate in contemporary design responses to the climate crisis.

Édouard Glissant & Cybernetics. Histories, Technologies, Practices of Being

In this project I explore his theoretical, poetic and political work through a lens of Black Studies and Media Theory at the same time to engage in questions of media and constructions of technology, histories and epistemologies.