Preview | Orit Halpern on Agentic Imaginaries (NM88) 2025

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https://newmodels.substack.com Our guest is Orit Halpern: co-author
of The Smartness Mandate (MIT Press, 2023); author of Beautiful
Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945 (Duke, 2014); and
Full Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures at Technische
Universität Dresden. Often in discussions about machine learning
and smartness, AI is presented as the natural path of human
progress, an evolutionary – almost biological – development that
emerged out of human communication systems and that has the
potential to far exceed them. But as Orit argues, these
technologies are neither inevitable nor inhuman. Rather they are
the result of a particular intersection of neoliberal theory,
psychology, and computer science that generated the economic
incentives, political will, and public desire for AI to exist in
the specific form we have now. On this episode, Orit animates the
technological imaginary that gave rise to our culture of AI,
asking, among other things, how a highly adaptive, machine-learning
enabled world changes the terms of political possibility and human
revolution. For more: https://orithalpern.net
 “Financializing
Intelligence: On the Integration of Markets & Machines“
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/on-models/519993/financializing-intelligence-on-the-integration-of-machines-and-markets/
“Futures of Cybernetic Urbanism” in "Intelligens. Natural.
Artificial. Collective" catalogue of the 19th Venice Architecture
Biennale (2025) Counter-Practices and The Image of Thought
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/29768640251335679
Planetary Infrastructure
https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-658-38128-8_1-1
- Episode image adapted from: Marco Zorzanello photo of the
installation TERMS AND CONDITIONS by Transsolar, Bilge Kobas,
Daniel A. Barber, and Sonia Seneviratne at La Biennale di Venezia,
2025