Chair of Digital Cultures

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TALKS & LECTURES

Apr 18, 2024

Talk at Columbia University Orit Halpern - The Smartness Mandate: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics

Apr 05, 2024

Keynote by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell at Cambridge University on April 8th.: The Smartness Mandate” AI and the Digital Series Leverhulme Center

Apr 01, 2024

Keynote talk by Orit Halpern at ETH Zurich on May 6th: Public Debate Session on Territory - Climate anxiety and mobilizing in crisis

Exhibition: Featuring Digital Cultures Chair and Future of Design

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Chair of Digital Cultures and the DST (Department of Speculative Transformation). The exhibition is about "Thinking the Future Together!“, from 18th April to 18th July 2024 at COSMO, promising an immersive exploration into the transformative landscapes of science and research.

Leakage: Inaugural Conference of stsing / March 19-22

This conference is a collaboration between the Chair of Digital Cultures, Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction, North American Literature and Future Studies, Human Geography, and Chair of Thermodynamics. It inaugurates stsing e.V., an association doing Science and Technology Studies (STS) in and through Germany, established in 2020. STS is an interdisciplinary field of research and activity interested in how science and technology are practically done and socially embedded.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah and Michelle Pfeifer receive Equality and Diversity Incentive Fund for the project «School of (Un)Thought. Wissensräume machtkritisch, kollektiv und diversitätssensibel gestalten.»

The project is consciously and critically dedicated to the university, in particular the classroom as a place where thought, research and knowledge are produced. A joint practice is to be developed with students, documented and archived/made available.

New Publication: Orit Halpern, "Beyond Data And Crisis" in Data Power in Action Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

New Publication: Orit Halpern, "Beyond Data And Crisis" in Data Power in Action Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis Edited by: Ola Söderström and Ayona Datta

Michelle Pfeifer receives transCampus grant to research digital democracy and queer rights

Dr. Michelle Pfeifer, postdoctoral research associate at the Chair for Digital Cultures, receives funding for the project "Digital Demonisation: LGBT Rights and the Struggle for Democracy." In collaboration with Dr. Billy Holzberg at the Centre for Public Policy Research at King’s College London the project will develop a framework for understanding the demonisation of minorities in digital culture today and build a strategic partnership between TUD and King's as part of the transCampus initiative.

Against Catastrophe Publication Drop: Solidarities Dispatch

Vol. 4 of Against Catastrophe edited by our postdoctoral research associate Michelle Pfeifer brings together an amazing group of writers, activists, and scholars to analyze solidarities as infrastructural tools, strategies, and actions equipped to imagine and bring about change featuring work by Judith Holz & Bernd Kasparek, Sophie Toupin, Samira Marty, Zahra Malkani, Leil Zahra Mortada, and Ian Alexander.

Smartness and Wealth: Orit Halpern is PI on a new 1.5 million Euro grant from VW Foundation

"Smartness and Wealth" investigates the promise of smart technologies and the future of human habitation. More information coming soon.

PHOTO CREDIT: LAWRENCE LEK, NOX, VIDEO GAME STILL, 2023. © LAWRENCE LEK. COMMISSIONED BY LAS ART FOUNDATION.

Orit Halpern on "Becoming Smart" as part of Lawrence Lek's Sinofuturism Opening @ LAS Berlin

In her essay, technology historian Orit Halpern expands on the concept of smartness that shapes Lawrence Lek’s world-building in NOX. NOX is Lawrence Lek’s largest exhibition to date that explores a near-future scenario shaped by the integration of artificial intelligence in urban life.

Attending [to] Futures, edited by Johanna Mehl & Carolin Höfler: Book Release

The "Attending [to] Futures. Matters of Politics in Design Education, Research, Practice" anthology is open access and available through adocs publishing. If “design” is the lens through which we glimpse into possible futures, this volume asks: What are the futures we are capable of imagining? Self-reflexively engaging their own experiences and work, authors in this volume interrogate design in all its convoluted modalities: as activism, practice, discipline, way of knowing, field of study and set of objects.

Research Studio: Extractive Pasts, Sustainable Futures?

March 11 - 18, 2024: The Chair for Digital Cultures, the Chair of Micro-Sociology and Techno-Social Interaction, and the Department for Speculative Transformation organize an interdisciplinary research studio on energy transition in Dresden and Lusatia for early-career researchers and practitioners interested in post-mining landscapes and the development of renewable energy infrastructures. The program is aimed at fostering exchange between social sciences, humanities, architecture, engineering, art, and design.

Conference: When was the "Smart Border"? | 15-17 Nov 2023

The conference is organized in collaboration between the Chair of Digital Cultures at TU Dresden, Germany, and the Department of Media and Communications at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. The event is funded by the Internationalization Strategy of TU Dresden and the LSE Global Research Fund. It aims to address the international research field on temporalities and histories of smart borders, to trace genealogies and longue durées of media, communication, and information technologies in the control of borders and migration.

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Against Catastrophe Publication Drop: Mobilities Dispatch

The new publication: "MOBILITIES DISPATCH" edited by our scientific associate Nelly Y. Pinkrah featuring an amazing group of writers, historians, scientists and media theorists re-thinking and re-imagining territory, race, class, biology, and extraction through the concept of "mobility" featuring Edna Bonhomme, Josephine Rapp, Sinthujan Varatharajah, Lotte Warnsholdt, Nelly Y. Pinkrah.

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

Orit Halpern gets interviewed by Dennis Pohl in THE NEW OPEN about the meaning of 'smart' in our data world and about her award winning book, "The Smartness Mandate"

Orit Halpern gets interviewed in THE NEW OPEN about her award winning book "The Smartness Mandate"

Smart borders and their critiques are too focused on the tech: Why we need a historical approach to envision different futures

Weizanbaum Institut: Orit Halpern “Our computer systems mirror our economic ideas about markets”

Interview with Orit Halpern at Weizenbaum Institut Berlin: “Our computer systems mirror our economic ideas about markets”

In the Interview with Prof. Dr.Orit Halpern at Weizenbaum Institut, she answers the questions about the influences and the relationship of neo-liberal thought, eugenics, sexism, racismon ideas of Artificial Intelligence, which reflect our current understandings of “smart”, “decision making” etc.

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Orit Halpern interviewed about Art and Research

Orit Halpern: “It is about our way to deal with a planetary condition. It demands that we rethink how we are relating to materials, […], and how we produce new types of experience and experiments, as well as and new kinds of aesthetics and storytelling that can produce meaning and care in a situation of absence of both. […] It is about imagining other futures.”

Orit Halpern interviewed in El Pais and Forbes Hispanico on Artificial Intelligence

Orit Halpern interviewed in El Pais and Forbes Hispanico on Artificial Intelligence and "Why Does Everything Have to Be Smart Right Now, Why is Smartness Something We Desire? (In Spanish)

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Thinking with “Thinking with an Accent”: A Roundtable Conversation with Michelle Pfeifer

A conversation between Slava Greenberg, Michelle Pfeifer, Vijay Ramjattan, Pooja Rangan, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Pavitra Sundar Thinking with an Accent was published in print and Open Access in February 2023. This summer, a few of us co-editors and contributors gathered online for a conversation about our respective contributions to the book and our thinking on and after its publication. Highlights from our virtual roundtable appear below.

Podcast with Orit Halpern at Diffractions Collective: The Mandate dem(o)ing of catastrophe

Orit Halpern discusses her latest book, co-authored with Robert Mitchell, The Smartness Mandate, which surveys the confluence of the logic of ‘smartness’ tied to catastrophe, demoing, temporality, populations, and ubiquitous computing.

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RIFS | Interview with Michaela Büsse | Multimodal – verortet zwischen Wissenschaft, Design und Kunst

Michaela Büsse ist Fellow am Forschungsinstitut für Nachhaltigkeit (RIFS) mit dem Blick auf soziomaterielle Transformationen im Kontext von spekulativem Urbanismus, der Energiewende und des sich ändernden Klimas. Im Interview erläutert sie ihre Forschungsidee, visionäre Energy-Islands zu untersuchen - und was auf der Berlin Science Week bei ihrer Veranstaltung „Building (with) Nature“ am 3. November 2023 passiert.

Beyond and Within: AI Talks A Podcast on Artificial Intelligence | Episode 2 | Decoding the Code | Interview with Orit Halpern

In the second episode, “Decoding the Code”, podcast host Eliane Eid talks to historian and professor Orit Halpern about the power and presence of AI in our daily lives through technological and historical changes. How is AI affecting the fundamentals of what it is like to be human? And how can intersectionality and Artificial Intelligence exist in the presence of categorised data?

Chemical Lexicon on Austrian Public Radio: Hear Professor Orit Halpern and others discuss the material infrastructures and new geo-politics of Silicon.

LEXIKON DER CHEMIE Silizium Mythos und Alptraum der Computerevolution. Das Halbmetall führte lange Zeit ein Schattendasein in der Liste essentieller Rohstoffe. 200 Jahre nach seiner Entdeckung, Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts, steht Silizium im Zentrum erbitterter Handelskriege - allen voran zwischen China und den USA. Die beiden Supermächte bekämpfen sich derzeit mit drastischen Exportbeschränkungen. Damit soll der Einsatz von Computerchips für intelligente Waffensysteme behindert bzw. kontrolliert werden.

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Book Review: Leonardo Magazine on the "Smartness Mandate" by Orit Halpern

The past decade–or even longer–has been full of all sorts of variations of “smartness”. Smart cities are likely at the forefront of this trend while it concerns multiple scales of technological solutions and even solutionism, as many would argue. Whether we reached peak smartness of corporate and public hype is to be decided (after all, new massive projects such as the NEOM in Saudi Arabia are marketed as “smart”, too) but the repercussions of particular ideas about the technological city and its political economy of data-driven operations continue, not least in terms of discourses of climate change, sustainability, and “resilience”.

Cybernetics Snacks: Orit Halpern Histories of science, computing and cybernetics, whisked with design, futures and social change.

Interview with Orit Halpern: Cybernetics Snacks

"Cybernetics Snacks" at the School of Cybernetics of Australian National University with Prof. Dr. Orit Halpern. She talks about the histories of science, computing and cybernetics, whisked with design, futures and social change.

To the video

Radio: Kulturjournal: Bayern 2: Moderationsgespräch mit Orit Halpern. “Immer smarter? Wie "Smartness" zum gesellschaftlichen Gebot der Stunde wurde."

Immer smarter? Wie "Smartness" zum gesellschaftlichen Gebot der Stunde wurde. Moderationsgespräch mit Orit Halpern, Professorin für Digital Cultures and Societal Change

Podcast - Interview with Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell - Book "The Smartness Mandate"

In The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023), Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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Podcast: Bridging the Gaps. Interview with Orit Halpern on new book "The Smartness Mandate".

Smartness has permeated our lives in the form of smartphones, smart cars, smart homes, and smart cities. It has become a mandate, a pervasive force that governs politics, economics, and the environment. As our world faces increasingly complex challenges, the drive for ubiquitous computing raises important questions. What exactly is this ‘smartness mandate’? How did it emerge, and what does it reveal about our evolving understanding and management of reality? How did we come to view the planet and its inhabitants primarily as instruments for data collection?

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.

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?

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, 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.”

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.

Chair of Digital Cultures

TALKS & LECTURES

Talk at Columbia University Orit Halpern - The Smartness Mandate: Neo-liberalism, Artificial Intelligence, and Politics

Keynote by Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell at Cambridge University on April 8th.: The Smartness Mandate” AI and the Digital Series Leverhulme Center

Keynote talk by Orit Halpern at ETH Zurich on May 6th: Public Debate Session on Territory - Climate anxiety and mobilizing in crisis

NEWS

Exhibition: Featuring Digital Cultures Chair and Future of Design

Leakage: Inaugural Conference of stsing / March 19-22

Nelly Y. Pinkrah and Michelle Pfeifer receive Equality and Diversity Incentive Fund for the project «School of (Un)Thought. Wis­sensräume machtkri­tisch, kollektiv und diver­sitätssen­sibel gestalten.»

New Publication: Orit Halpern, "Beyond Data And Crisis" in Data Power in Action Urban Data Politics in Times of Crisis

Michelle Pfeifer receives transCampus grant to research digital democracy and queer rights

Against Catastrophe Publication Drop: Solidari­ties Dispatch

Smartness and Wealth: Orit Halpern is PI on a new 1.5 million Euro grant from VW Foundation

Orit Halpern on "Becoming Smart" as part of Lawrence Lek's Sinofutur­ism Opening @ LAS Berlin

Attending [to] Futures, edited by Johanna Mehl & Carolin Höfler: Book Release

Research Studio: Extractive Pasts, Sustainable Futures?

Conference: When was the "Smart Border"? | 15-17 Nov 2023

Against Catastrophe Publication Drop: Mobilities Dispatch

Digital Cultures Research Group

Media

Orit Halpern gets interviewed by Dennis Pohl in THE NEW OPEN about the meaning of 'smart' in our data world and about her award winning book, "The Smartness Mandate"

Smart borders and their critiques are too focused on the tech: Why we need a historical approach to envision different futures

Interview with Orit Halpern at Weizenbaum Institut Berlin: “Our computer systems mirror our economic ideas about markets”

Orit Halpern interviewed about Art and Research

Orit Halpern interviewed in El Pais and Forbes Hispanico on Artificial Intelli­gence

Thinking with “Thinking with an Accent”: A Roundtable Conversa­tion with Michelle Pfeifer

Podcast with Orit Halpern at Diffrac­tions Collective: The Mandate dem(o)ing of catastrophe

RIFS | Interview with Michaela Büsse | Multimodal – verortet zwischen Wis­senschaft, Design und Kunst

Beyond and Within: AI Talks A Podcast on Artificial Intelli­gence | Episode 2 | Decoding the Code | Interview with Orit Halpern

Chemical Lexicon on Austrian Public Radio: Hear Professor Orit Halpern and others discuss the material infrastruc­tures and new geo-politics of Silicon.

Book Review: Leonardo Magazine on the "Smartness Mandate" by Orit Halpern

Interview with Orit Halpern: Cybernetics Snacks

Radio: Kulturjour­nal: Bayern 2: Modera­tionsge­spräch mit Orit Halpern. “Immer smarter? Wie "Smartness" zum gesellschaftlichen Gebot der Stunde wurde."

Podcast - Interview with Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell - Book "The Smartness Mandate"

Podcast: Bridging the Gaps. Interview with Orit Halpern on new book "The Smartness Mandate".

MICRO INTERVIEW: Design + Posthuman­ism Network

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

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

BOOK REVIEW: The Smartness Mandate, Engineering and Technology

BOOK REVIEW: The Smartness Mandate: Re-thinking smartness

Nelly Y. Pinkrah and Michelle Pfeifer receive Equality and Diversity Incentive Fund for the project «School of (Un)Thought. Wissensräume machtkritisch, kollektiv und diversitätssensibel gestalten.»

Against Catastrophe Publication Drop: Solidarities Dispatch

Orit Halpern on "Becoming Smart" as part of Lawrence Lek's Sinofuturism Opening @ LAS Berlin

Orit Halpern interviewed in El Pais and Forbes Hispanico on Artificial Intelligence

Thinking with “Thinking with an Accent”: A Roundtable Conversation with Michelle Pfeifer

Podcast with Orit Halpern at Diffractions Collective: The Mandate dem(o)ing of catastrophe

RIFS | Interview with Michaela Büsse | Multimodal – verortet zwischen Wissenschaft, Design und Kunst

Beyond and Within: AI Talks A Podcast on Artificial Intelligence | Episode 2 | Decoding the Code | Interview with Orit Halpern

Chemical Lexicon on Austrian Public Radio: Hear Professor Orit Halpern and others discuss the material infrastructures and new geo-politics of Silicon.

Radio: Kulturjournal: Bayern 2: Moderationsgespräch mit Orit Halpern. “Immer smarter? Wie "Smartness" zum gesellschaftlichen Gebot der Stunde wurde."

MICRO INTERVIEW: Design + Posthumanism Network