It’s a Match!
Orit Halpern, Iris Long and Yandong Li on Environmental Objects

In her presentation, Iris Long will present her curatorial project Earth Heat Flow: the Visitor Who Returns to Solar Time, exploring how the notion of “melting” under the sun becomes both a narrative and a spatial design method within the exhibition. The exhibition interrogates how our digital infrastructures—data centers, network exchanges, and fiber-optic systems—continuously extract planetary energy and therefore contribute to a regulated thermal environment. The talk will trace how heat operates as a latent condition within contemporary technological systems and speculates on its entanglements with entropy and time. Each of the discussed works is incorporated into a broader narrative of “melting,” understood as a process that either transforms the form of objects or reveals what is otherwise concealed. The exhibition invites viewers to immerse themselves in the planet’s geothermal currents, using these flows as a lens through which to perceive the vertical strata linking solar radiation with the lithospheric thermal structure.

In his talk, Yandong Li will focus on the solar cooker, a simple low-tech device that converts sunlight into heat energy. Designed to replace open-fire ovens, which cause severe problems in household air pollution, health, and biodiversity loss, solar cooker projects are not only aimed to reduce environmental impact, but advocate for social issues such as women empowerment and equal opportunities. These promises however are not manifested through cooking features but through the solar cooker’s visual characteristics—de facto treated as an art installation from projects in China in the 1970s and 1980s, to the philanthropic work of international organizations from the 1980s to the present day. Through photographs and on-site placements, these projects train ordinary observers to adapt to a new habitual perception of the new energy (xinnengyuan) that is visually striking, novel, and extraterrestrial in nature, while they structurally still retain the old extractive, colonial, and patriarchal relationship to energy and its infrastructures.

Biographical Notes

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 University. 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.

Iris Long is a independent curator, writer, Berggruen Fellow, and licensed amateur radio operator. Her long-term research focuses on China’s technological infrastructures and the psychogeography of science and technology. She has curated multiple exhibitions related to scientific and technological themes. Her work has been published or presented at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge; Antikythera; the Warburg Institute; the Centre for Outer Space Studies at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, among others. She has also served as an international art juror for the ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) and the Art Gallery of SIGGRAPH Asia. Personal website: irislong.xyz

Yandong Li is a PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies and the program of Science, Technology, and Society Studies at the University of Washington, where he is a Presidential Dissertation Fellow and a Society of Scholars. He works at the intersection of media theory, history of technology and design, and environmental humanities. His writings appeared in Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Journal of Environmental Media, NiCHE, and The Lab Book (entry for the "Cultural Techniques" chapter), among others. He is also a guest co-editor of the special issue “Energy and Media” for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. In early 2025, Yandong was a predoctoral student at KHI in the "Coded Objects" group led by Anna-Maria Meister.