Orit Halpern
Bio
| Dr. Orit Halpern is an assistant professor in the History and the Media Studies Departments at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of Science in 2006, and has also been a Franklin Institute Fellow at Duke University in 2006-07. Currently, she works on histories of perception and representation related to cybernetics. Her current book project is labeled : The Eye of Time: Histories of Representation, Perception, and Archiving in Cybernetics. |
Abstract
The Scanning Eye: Knowledge and Visuality in Cybernetics
This paper will investigate attitudes to pedagogy and perception in post-war design, architecture, and cognitive science. This is part of a longer history of interactivity; situating our contemporary forms of
spectatorship and interactivity.
One site to investigate these changes in perception is at the locus of science, design, film and architecture in the works of Charles and Ray Eames and Gyorgy Kepes. In these works, including many science education and pedagogy films, advertising, and corporate architectures, the nature of spectatorship was being rethought, and retrained. In their work we can find evidence of a more global reformulation between science, technology, aesthetics, and visuality. These are transformations in representation and epistemology that are the blueprints to contemporary information economies and architectures.