Orit Halpern

Orit Halpern (b. 1972) is an American historian and cyberneticist. She is known for her research on data, infrastructure, smart technologies and artificial intelligence at planetary scale. She is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at TU Dresden, and is the author of two monographs. Her first, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason, traces a history of big data and interactivity, holding that attention, observation and truth are locally situated, conditional and contingent. Her second, The Smartness Mandate, co-authored with Robert Edward Mitchell, argues that "smartness" is not a property of sensory, connected technologies, but rather a distinct form of knowledge and a way to shape how we see reality. Halpern is involved in several research groups, including Governing Through Design, which uses history and ethnography methods to explore how design influences global politics and perspectives, and Against Catastrophe, which interrogates the concept of catastrophe and drawing on the field of futures studies, develops anti-catastrophic practices to envision alternative futures.

Halpern completed her PhD at Harvard University in 2006 with a dissertation titled Screen-Memories: Temporality, Perception, and the Archive in Cybernetic Thought, where she produced a genealogy of interactivity by excavating the relationship between the archive and the interface in digital systems, using cybernetics as a departure point. Here, Halpern related contemporary practices in archiving and interactivity to modernist concerns with temporality, representation and memory.