Orit Halpern is a Lighthouse Professor and the Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her research is on histories of cybernetics, design, and artificial intelligence. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of automating decision making and the second examines the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.

Her most recent book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press December 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. It examines how we have come to believe that digital computing is essential to human survival, and how “smart” technologies and ideologies are remaking planetary futures. She is also the director of the Against Catastrophe a laboratory bridging the arts, environmental sciences, media, and the social sciences to envision noncatastrophic futures.

SIAH: Public Life (Series abstract)
Arts and Humanities have always been crucial to the idea of the 'public life': the public is valorised as the realm of collective debate and decisionmaking, of community and solidarity, of art and culture. Such concepts, of course, have always been contested and never more so than right now. The electronic capture of the commons, the removal of boundaries between work and home, the policing of public spaces, the onslaught of the culture wars, the hold of big data and surveillance, the spectacles of populist politics have all changed the meanings, the spaces and the limits of the public sphere.

SIAH: Public Life draws a range of leading intellectuals into conversation about what the ideal of the 'public life' can mean to Arts and Humanities researchers and disciplines in the twentyfirst century.