Orit Halpern
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Dr. Orit Halpern is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. Currently she is writing three books. The first is a history and theory of smartness and machine learning territories, the second is a genealogy of resilience and the historical transformations that have occurred in the relationship between economy, ecology, and computation since the 1970’s, and the third is an atlas of intelligences. She is also the director of the Speculative Life Research Cluster, a laboratory situated at the intersection of the environmental sciences, architecture and design, and computational media.
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Abstract
The Planetary Bet
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Volatility—extremes of high and low, temporal scales between the geological and digital, varying thresholds of toxicity, safety, poverty—these are the differentials that in contemporary societies are the very mediums for financial speculation and ubiquitous computing. This talk will examine how concepts of resilience from ecology, ideas of systems management from cybernetics and design, and algorithmic investment strategies from finance merged to produce both a contemporary mode of disaster speculation that I label "the planetary bet” and an affective sentiment of "resilient hopefulness".
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“Computing isn’t about computing anymore. It’s about living.”-Nicholas Negroponte
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“ From an Early Age I was very Fascinated By Uncertainty”--Myron Scholes