LOOPS is an event series that explores current questions facing our society from a wide range of perspectives in talks, workshops and various explorative formats. The aim is to create a platform for the presentation and discussion of interdisciplinary approaches to topics at the intersection of art, science and technology.

Orit Halpern and Jeffrey Kirkwood join us for a conversation on the models, infrastructures and histories of financial markets and computational capitalism. Models as “engines” that produce markets and meaning align with the historic reformulation of human intelligence as machinic and networked. What can emerge in the discontinuous intervals of algorithmic organisation? The event is in English and open to all to attend.

Orit Halpern is Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at TU Dresden. She completed her PHD at Harvard University. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design, such as in her recent book with Robert Mitchell titled the Smartness Mandate (MIT Press 2022). She has also published in Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux among others. Her current research focuses on the history of automation and intelligence as well as the extreme infrastructures emerging through experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering.

Jeffrey Kirkwood is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University (SUNY) and Senior Fellow in the NOMIS Research Project “The New Real: Past, Present, and Future of Computation, and the Ecologization of Cultural Techniques” at Bauhaus University. He completed his PHD at Princeton University. Kirkwood is the author of Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology and Semiotechnics around 1900 (Minnesota, 2022), where he argues that cinema engineered an entirely new model of the psyche, laying the technological and philosophical groundwork for the digital world. His work has been published in Critical Inquiry, Grey Room and October among others.

The event will be held in English and is open to all participants.