Course Direction and Conception:
Dr. Orit Halpern
Dr. Orit Halpern is a Strategic Hire in Interactive Design and Theory and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University, Montréal. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design and art practice. Her most recent book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke Press 2015) is a genealogy of interactivity and our contemporary obsessions with “big” data and data visualization. She is now working on two books. The first, titled The Smartness Mandate, is a history and theory of “smartness”, environment, and ubiquitous computing and the second tentatively titled Resilient Hope investigates how design and actuarial technologies manage un-representable and un- calculatable catastrophes of environment, security, and finance.
She is also a co-director of the Speculative Life Research Lab, a speculative design research cluster at the intersection of art and the life sciences, architecture and design, and computational media that is part of the Milieux, Institute for Technology, Art and Culture. She has also published and created works for a variety of venues including Grey Room, E-flux, Volume, The Journal of Visual Culture, Public Culture, Configurations, C-theory, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany.
She has an MPH. from Columbia University School of Public Health, and completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in the History of Science.
www.orithalpern.net
www.speculativelife.com
Pierre-Louis Patoine
Instructors:
Visiting Lecturers:
Sarah Sharma, University of Toronto
Ezekiel Dixon Roman, University of Pennsylvania:
Bernhard Foing, European Space Agency:
Marie-Pier Boucher, Post-doc Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Assistant Professor University of Toronto
Perig Petrou, CNRS Paris
Jonathan Hope
Associate professorDépartement d'études littérairesUniversité du Québec à Montréal
Participants, Creators and Authors:
Hicham Awad
Katherine Buse
Blair Bainbridge
Nadia Christidi
Catherine Cornum
Maya Indira Ganesh
Ségolène Guinard
Natalie Koerner
Joel Laforest
Garrett Lockheart
Cécile Martin
Matthew Nye
June Pham
Daniel Rourke
Andrés Salas
Joana Rodrigues
Harsh Seetharama Bhat
Margaret Symuleski
Heloise Thomas
Tricia Toso