Orit Halpern is a Lighthouse Professor and the Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her research is on histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. It examines how we have come to believe that digital computing is essential to human survival, and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. She is also the director of the Against Catastrophe, a laboratory bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures. She is currently writing a book on extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.
