Orit Halpern is the Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden, where she directs the Digital Cultures Research Group and the Schaufler Lab—two interdisciplinary research groups bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and social sciences to envision non-catastrophic futures.
Her work traces how computational systems have reshaped decision-making, knowledge, and political life from the mid-twentieth century to the present. She is currently pursuing two major projects: a history of automated decision-making and its transformation of concepts of freedom and the human, and an investigation of planetary-scale experimentation across design, science, and engineering.
Her most recent book, The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023) asks how digital computing came to be seen as essential to human survival—and how "smart" technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. Her first book, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke University Press, 2015), offers a genealogy of big data, interactivity, and their politics. Her writing has also appeared in numerous venues including New Media and Society, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, Journal of Visual Culture, E-Flux, and Art in America, and she has also featured numerous times at the Venice Biennial for Architecture and other artistic venues.