• Akademie der Künste / Hanseatenweg / Blue Room
An Engine Not a Camera

with Orit Halpern

Moderated by Ryan Bishop

  • Lecture Performance
Passes only
An Engine Not a Camera With Orit Halpern Moderated by Ryan Bishop

The infamous neoliberal economist Milton Friedman is often paraphrased as saying that models don’t represent markets, they make them. A model, after all, is an operative machine, and even more so in the digital age. In this lecture performance, Orit Halpern moves between the neuron, patents, smart borders and infrastructure, demonstrating how models and their financial logics have become incorporated in our present. Through her survey, spanning from artificial intelligence to finance, to synthetic biology to demography, Halpern draws a topography of new territories emerging from ubiquitous computing, posing questions about scale, technology, economy, environment, and politics.

This Lecture Performance is prepared with the help of Nelly Pinkrah and Michelle Pfeifer.

Orit Halpern is Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design.
Ryan Bishop is Professor of Global Art and Politics at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. Together with Jussi Parikka, he co-directs the Archaeologies of Media and Technology (AMT) research group at WSA.