In our present few terms have become more central to urban planning, environmental management, policy, and business management then “resilience”. This talk will trace a history of resilience in ecology, cybernetics, and economics to ask how models of nature as constantly volatile and crisis ridden are shaping technology, habitat, and life in our present and future.
Orit Halpern is from the USA. She is a Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automating intelligence, democracy, and decision making; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.
She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, and Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Date: A History of Vision and Reason (Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her current book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press December 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. 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.
URL’s:
https://againstcatastrophe.net/
https://tu-dresden.de/gsw/slk/germanistik/digitalcultures
https://dst-tud.de/
www.againstcatastrophe.net
The event will be followed by a small reception.