Orit Halpern
Visiting Scholar (Mar 2018-Apr 2018)
PhD, Associate Professor, Sociology and Anthropology
Dr. Orit Halpern is a Strategic Hire in Interactive Theory and Design and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice.
She is also a co-director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a research-creation laboratory situated at the intersection of the computational and environmental sciences, design, and anthropology.
She is currently working on three projects: the first is a history and theory of “smartness”; the second is about extreme infrastructures, resilience, and speculation; and the third is with Tal Halpern and is a comic book whose plot is not to be divulged, but it will involve neural nets, machines that learn (including ourselves), and Mongolian gerbils.
Her recent monograph, Beautiful Data (Duke Press, 2015), is a history of interactivity, data visualization, and ubiquitous computing. She has also published and created works for a variety of venues including e-flux, Rhizome, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
Projects
Test-Bed Planets
Selected Publications
Halpern, O. (2017). Architecture as machine: a brief history of the smart city, design and cybernetics. In A. Goodman (
Read MoreEd. ), Archeology of the digital: complexity and contradiction. Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Halpern, O., Mitchell, R., & Geoghegan, B. (2017). The smartness mandate: notes towards a critique. Grey Room, 68, 106-129.
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Halpern, O. (2017). Hopeful resilience. E-Flux Architecture; special issue.
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Halpern, O. (2015). Beautiful data: a history of vision and reason since 1945. Durham: Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822376323.
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