Director of Against Catastrophe

Orit Halpern is Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische Universität Dresden. Her work bridges the histories of science, computing, and cybernetics with design. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard. She has held numerous visiting scholar positions including at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, IKKM Weimar, and at Duke University. She is currently working on two projects. The first is a history of intelligence and evolution; the second project examines extreme infrastructures and the history of experimentation at planetary scales in design, science, and engineering. She has also published widely in many venues including Critical Inquiry, Grey Room, Journal of Visual Culture, and E-Flux. Her first book Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason(Duke UP 2015) investigates histories of big data, design, and governmentality. Her current book with Robert Mitchell (MIT Press 2023) is titled the Smartness Mandate. She is also one of the Primary Investigators of the Governing through Design Research Group and a P.I. on the AUDACE FQRSC project Reclaiming the Planet, both which sponsor this project.

Sudipto Basu is a second year PhD student and J.A. DeSeve Graduate Fellow in Film and Moving Image Studies, Concordia University. His ongoing research is about the entanglement of the Cold War-era discourses of population control and management with infrastructure projects and developmental experiments in the Global South, particularly India. He has previously worked on the intersections of experimental cinema since the Cold War, cybernetics and the Anthropocene; post-war Bombay cinema’s political economy and the experimental turn in Films Division India. His written work has been published in APRJA, IIC Quarterly and Critical Collective, and a video essay he co-directed, Tracts of Dust (2018), has shown in Bangkok Biennial and Little Cinema International Festival, Kolkata.

Nadia Christidi is an academic and arts practitioner. Her research focuses on how the future of water is being imagined and prepared for in cities facing water supply challenges, which are intensifying with climate change, including Dubai and Los Angeles. Nadia was formerly a TBA-21 Academy Ocean Fellow, a Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions at MIT’s Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, a Delfina Foundation curatorial/research fellow, and an Art Jameel Arts Research and Writing Resident. She is committed to working at the intersection of art, science, and policy, and producing public programming around her research to engage diverse audiences. Her work and programs have been presented at Beirut Art Center, SALT Galata, SALT Ulus, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Jameel Arts Centre, the Al Sidr Environmental Film Festival, and Ocean Space in Venice. Nadia holds a PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society from MIT and is a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project Governing through Design.

Dr. Özgün Eylül İşcen is a postdoctoral researcher at the Schaufler Lab at Technische Universität Dresden. Her recent research explores the intersection of data worlds with urban, migrant, and environmental movements that challenge profit-driven and extractive modes of futurity. She is also a member of the multimodal project Governing through Design, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Eylül earned her PhD in the Program of Computational Media, Arts and Cultures at Duke University. Her dissertation examines the geopolitical aesthetic of computational media, focusing on media histories and artistic practices within the context of the Middle East. She was a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Eylül has published extensively in edited volumes, art catalogues, and academic journals, including Ethnic and Racial Studies and Organised Sound. She co-edited the volume Displacing Theory Through the Global South with Iracema Dulley, published by ICI Berlin Press in 2024. She has taught courses on digital media and arts at Universität der Künste Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she collaborates with Shintaro Miyazaki on alternative futures of computing through the web-based research exchange platform Counter-N.

Johanna Mehl is a designer, design scholar, and educator interested in the larger material and immaterial systems that shape design practices and that design in turn propagates. She holds a B.A. in Communication Design from the Niederrhein University of Applied Science, Krefeld and an M.A. in Art and Design Studies from the Folkwang University of the Arts, Essen. Besides her artistic and curatorial practice, she has taught in the fields of media and design theory at different design schools across Europe and worked as the coordinator of the M.A. program Integrated Design at KISD (Köln International School of Design). She recently started a research associate position at Technische Universität Dresden, continuing her Ph.D. research on design paradigm shifts in the anthropocene.

Dr. Michelle Pfeifer is postdoctoral fellow in Artificial Intelligence, Emerging Technologies at Technische Universität Dresden in the Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change. Their research is located at the intersections of (digital) media technology, migration and border studies, and gender and sexuality studies and explores the role of media technology in the production of legal and political knowledge amidst struggles over mobility and movement(s) in postcolonial Europe. Michelle earned their PhD at the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University with a dissertation titled Data and Borders: Tracking Media Technologies of Migration Control in Europe that offers a critical analysis of how state projects use language and algorithmic analysis to maintain the European border, control migration, and enforce asylum regimes. Michelle’s research has been published in Citizenship Studies and Culture Machine and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology Thinking with an Accent from the University of California Press. They co-edited the special issue “The Sexual Politics of Border Control” published in Ethnic and Racial Studies and co-organized the international symposium “Sexuality and Borders” at NYU. Michelle has taught courses on media and identity and methods in media studies. They are also the recipient of a doctoral research fellowship from the Berlin Program at Free University Berlin and a dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren foundation as well as grants from the NYU Migration Network and the Princeton-Weimar Summer School for Media Studies.

Nelly Y. Pinkrah is a research assistant at Technical University in Dresden, Germany with the Chair for Digital Cultures. She is interested in black studies, media & technology, poetics & politics, critical pedagogy & practice and speaks, writes and workshops for magazines, organizations and institutions. Her doctoral thesis about Édouard Glissant, histories of technology and cybernetics is finished at Leuphana University Lüneburg where she is also associated with the Centre for Digital Cultures and an alumna of the research training group «Cultures of Critique». In 2021 she was a lecturer at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, from October 2018 to May 2019 she was a Doctoral Fellow at the Global Emergent Media Lab at Concordia University, Montréal. She co-edited issue 26 of the German Journal for Media Studies (ZfM): «X | Kein Lagebericht« (04/2022), which is an anti-racist critique of the institution. Nelly is a Senior Fellow with Humanity in Action, member of the German Forum Antiracism Media Studies (FAM) as well as the DFG Network »Gender, Media, Affect«