[iDC] Introduction

[Orit Halpern]

Hello! I just wanted to introduce myself to the list. My name is Orit 
Halpern and I am a historian of science at Eugene Lang and New School 
for Social Research.

I work on histories of perception, representation, and digital media. My 
current book is a historical and philosophical excavation into the 
relationship between the archive, memory, and perception in digital 
systems. Using the post-war science of cybernetics—the study of 
communication and control—as a point of departure, I trace out how early 
engineers and architects of human-machine interaction, such as Norbert 
Wiener and Warren McCulloch, were informed by, and reformulated, 
different theoretical and technical practices from 19th and early 20th 
century film, psychology, psychoanalysis, design, and philosophy. 
Through this practice, I chart the relationship between contemporary 
obsessions with archiving and interactivity in digital systems to 
previous modernist concerns with temporality, representation, and memory.

While labor is not a central term in my work, I am hoping to contribute 
by situating our contemporary modes of perception. I hope to start a 
discussion linking transformations in governmentality, subjectivity, and 
representation to those in economy.

I look forward to more.


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www.orithalpern.net <http://www.orithalpern.net>