Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern is a historian of science and a media studies scholar. Her work focuses on how new technologies impact society and how media infrastructures produce worlds. She has written extensively about cybernetics, architecture and design, artificial intelligence, finance, and big data. 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. Her first book Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and politics. She also directs two design history and practice research platforms Governing Through Design and Against Catastrophe.

She is the Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Social Change at TU Dresden.