Ben Grosser

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing conceptions of friendship? Who benefits when a software system can intuit how we feel? What changes in democracy and society when platforms designed for growth and engagement become our primary window to the wider world? To examine questions like these, he constructs interactive experiences, machines, and systems that make the familiar unfamiliar, revealing the ways that software prescribes our behavior and thus, how it changes who we are.

Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican Centre and Somerset House in London, Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, SXSW in Austin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. His projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK) proclaimed Grosser’s film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTE (Ireland) dubbed him an “antipreneur,” and Slate commended his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.