Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is a scholar of digital culture, cybernetics, and the politics of data, currently Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at the Technische Universität Dresden, where she directs the Digital Cultures Research Group and the Schaufler Lab, interdisciplinary research groups bridging arts, environmental sciences, media, and social sciences. She holds a PhD in History of Science from Harvard University (2006) and was a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University’s John Hope Franklin Center. She previously held positions at Concordia University, Montreal, the New School for Social Research, New York University, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. Her research examines the historical and contemporary entanglements of computation, governance, and planetary futures, focusing on how cybernetics and communication sciences reshaped the social and human sciences, design, and urban planning after 1945. Her book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2014) traces the postwar impact of big data, interactivity, and cognitive science from the 1964 World’s Fair through the Korean smart city Songdo. The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023, with Robert Mitchell) argues that “smartness” is not primarily a technology but an epistemology, critically examining how AI and machine learning are remaking planetary futures under the sign of resilience. She leads the research and curatorial project “Against Catastrophe,” supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Homepage: orithalpern.net

Selected Bibliography
Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014.
Halpern, Orit, and Robert Mitchell. The Smartness Mandate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023.