Artist Ben Grosser focuses on 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.
Grosser’s exhibition venues include Centre Pompidou in Paris, Somerset House and The Barbican Centre in London, Eyebeam in New York, SXSW in Austin, Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Science Gallery in Dublin, and the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. Solo exhibitions have included Software for Less at arebyte Gallery in London, Galerie Charlot in Paris, and the Aksioma Institute of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana. Upcoming exhibitions include a show at ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe.
His artworks have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, PBS, Fast Company, Hyperallergic, BBC, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, El País, and Folha. The Guardian (UK) proclaimed his film ORDER OF MAGNITUDE to be a definitive artwork of the 21st century, “a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ (Ireland) dubbed Grosser an “antipreneur.” and Slate commended his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.”
Grosser’s scholarly writing appears in journals such as Computational Culture, Media-N, Electronic Book Review, and Big Data and Society. His projects are frequently discussed 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.
His recognitions include First Prize in VIDA 16, a Net Art Grant from Rhizome, the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from the Stuttgarter Filmwinter, the Artist Gallery Prize from Arte Laguna, a Jury Selection at the Japan Media Arts Festival, an Artist’s Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and a Fellowship with Harvard University’s Institute for Rebooting Social Media at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Grosser is currently Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (USA), and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In 2023-24 he was a Guest Professor of Digital Design and Information Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark and a Guest Researcher with the Center for Digital Narrative at the University of Bergen in Norway.