Benjamin Grosser, an artist and a composer, is currently pursuing an MFA in New Media at the University of Illinois’ School of Art + Design. Previously he earned two degrees in music composition from Illinois before moving to the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, where he directed the Imaging Technology Group.
Grosser’s visual art practice combines art, music, science, and technology to create works that explore technology and culture. He focuses on the ways that technology is changing our experience of the world, and uses those same technologies as a primary medium to create works that both reveal and examine those changes. Does computer-mediated vision change how we see without computers? Do surveillance technologies modify the way we speak or think about ourselves in public? Has “reality” media altered non-mediated reality? Grosser’s works use interaction to construct an experience that encourages personal consideration of these questions. His artistic work has been covered widely in the online press, including articles on Boing Boing, the Make Blog, Engadget, Fast Company, and Juxtapoz. The Huffington Post said of his Interactive Robotic Painting Machine that “Grosser may have unknowingly birthed the apocalypse.” His works have been curated into the Rhizome ArtBase, on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and supported by an Illinois Creative and Performing Arts Fellowship.
Grosser’s music, which has been called “very loud and ugly” by the St. Louis Riverfront Times, often includes the use of computers, whether as a collaborative composer or as a method for sound generation. His work on GACSS (Genetic Algorithms in Composition and Sound Synthesis), an original sound synthesis software package, received multiple grants and was awarded an Arnold O. Beckman research award. He has enjoyed performances at concerts and festivals throughout the USA, the most recent being the world premiere of his Shift for six udderbots by Jacob Barton at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art in 2011. His Not Pitch for baritone saxophone and computer-generated sounds was recently recorded by saxophonist Rhonda Taylor for release on the shh label.
As director of the Imaging Technology Group at the Beckman Institute, Grosser’s research was in remote/virtual instrumentation and computer graphics. He was the original interface programmer on the Bugscope project and led a redesign funded by the Submeta Foundation. His development of the Virtual Microscope was funded by multiple grants from NASA, and received their Software Award. Grosser’s work on computational approaches to artificial bone implant modeling was funded by an Illinois Critical Research Initiative grant. His visualizations of this and other work have received recognition at SIGGRAPH, and received a Semifinalist Honor in the National Science Foundation’s Visualization Challenge. His visualizations have been published on the covers of books and journals, including the journal Nature. His research has been covered by the New York Times and National Public Radio.