Chair of Digital Cultures

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NEWS

May 24, 2023

Event: Jun 7-9,2023 - Historical Epistemologies of Planetary Modelling

May 24, 2023

Republica 23 - Panel discussion - Talk by Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern

Visual identity of the talk series Human Entities 2023

Apr 30, 2023

Human Entities 2023: Smart Power Talk by Orit Halpern @MENUPTENTRIENAL DE ARQUITECTURA DE LISBO

Events, Talks, Lectures, Workshops

Jun 2 2023

DGTF Conference 2023: Design and Digital Justice — Annual conference and 20th anniversary

Jun 7 2023

re:publica 23 - Panel discussion - Talk by Prof.Dr. Orit Halpern

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

Digital Cultures Research Group

Our research group is invested in exploring the politics, histories and imaginaries that inform the future of how we envision digital technologies and infrastructures. Our present is delineated by ubiquitous computation, geopolitical conflicts, constant global displacement and accelerating environmental crises. This warrants interdisciplinary analysis that recognizes the inseparability of media technologies, hegemonic power structures and infrastructures.

Media

BOOK REVIEW: The Smartness Mandate: Does Smart Always Make Sense

Who doesn’t dream of owning a house that automatically closes the windows when it starts to rain, or a car that copes with traffic so you don’t have to? The science fiction of yesterday is today’s reality, and even better days are on the horizon. Such is the promise of “smartness.” It’s touted as the answer to all of humanity’s problems, a path not just to prosperity but to the very survival of our species. Is a smart future inevitable, though? What would a world constructed by smartness look like, and is it the best future we can imagine?

MICRO INTERVIEW: Design + Posthumanism Network

Thomas Laurien (HDK Valand) interviews Johanna Mehl (TU Dresden) about her engagement in the Design + Posthumanism Network and current research.

RADIO INTERVIEW: The Smartness Mandate: The Archipelago "Must Everything Become Smart?"

The imperative is that everything must become smart. Everything must produce data which are collected and used in systems that learn from them. This way everything can and will be fixed through technology. This is at least what the Imaginary of smartness says.. In this episode, Orit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden, talks about the rise of the Smartness Mandate, how it differs from biopolitics and the new forms of governmentality associated with it.

BOOK REVIEW: The Smartness Mandate: Re-thinking smartness

In our recently-published genealogy of smartness, The Smartness Mandate, we document the way in which ideologies and practices of smartness and artificial intelligence change human habitation, politics, and economics. Our central concern is the uncanny resonance between theories of the neoliberal market and the practices of smartness. We argue that this is no coincidence.

BOOK REVIEW: The Smartness Mandate, Engineering and Technology

Smartness, the drive towards ubiquitous computing, has gone beyond technological horizon-scanning to shaping the way we live today, says Orit Halpern. “We call it a mandate,” says Dr Orit Halpern, “because we’re interested in how machine learning and artificial intelligence have become natural and necessary to the evolution of society. It’s when we decide a particular technology is essential to the way we live in a way it hasn’t always been.”