THE SMARTNESS MANDATE: AI and Ubiquitous Computing’s Impact on Art and Design

Smart medicine. Smart homes. Smart cities. Smart Grids. This talk traces a unique genealogy of the natural and human sciences in relationship with art and design to demonstrate how the long historical imperative to make our world ever smarter through ubiquitous computing, artificial intelligence, and perpetual “learning” has become the new logic of our present.  As Halpern, a historian of science with broad interests in the social-cultural impacts of technology will demonstrate, the mandate for ubiquitous and immersive “smartness” has changed the way we understand the very nature of society, economics, culture and environment for both better and worse. In other words, the smartness mandate is central to how we design and envision the future.

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change, Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She is the author of Beautiful Data (Duke UP 2015) and The Smartness Mandate with Robert Mitchell (forthcoming). As part of her work, she is also interested in digital cinema and multimedia documentary, architecture and design, contemporary art practice, animation, and literature.