Ben Grosser investigates how engagement interfaces—from social media to AI chatbots—shape human behavior, desire, and culture. Working inside the platforms he critiques, he uses tactics such as software recomposition, interface reduction, and radical reimagination to expose the politics hidden in software. For fifteen years, his aesthetic interventions have anticipated the cultural and emotional consequences of Big Tech platform design, made palpable how interfaces transform attention into profit, and built working countermodels to the logic of endless growth.
Grosser’s Demetricator series (2012–22) hid every visible number across major social platforms, introducing “demetrication” seven years before Instagram started testing hidden like counts. Go Rando (2017) randomized Facebook “reactions” to obfuscate users’ emotion profiles a year before Cambridge Analytica made psychographic manipulation headline news. His nearly 50-minute supercut ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (2019), built from Mark Zuckerberg’s every public “more,” “grow,” and metric, framed growth itself as Facebook’s pathology, the same diagnosis co-founder Chris Hughes later made in his call to break up the company. And Minus (2021–), a “finite social network” that limits users to 100 posts—for life—was featured in a front-page New York Times story on the future of social media, where Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain said it shows that social media “doesn’t have to be this way.”
Now Grosser focuses on AI chatbots, where the engagement interface no longer lives in the visible metric or the infinite scroll but in language itself: systems engineered to keep us talking and sharing, changing not just what we expect from our friends but who or what those friends should be. Recent AI works include Lux Affirma, a chatbot endlessly amazed by everything you say; Winning Friends, a mod that exposes ChatGPT’s alignment with Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People; and the sound work Paying Attention (Mm-hmm), which examines how AI voice models make you feel heard. With Søren Pold, he co-authored “Reading the Praise/Prompt Machine,” an interface-criticism approach to ChatGPT.
Grosser has exhibited at the Pompidou (Paris), the Barbican (London), the Louisiana (Denmark), ZKM (Karlsruhe), and CCCB (Barcelona), with solo exhibitions at arebyte Gallery (London), Galerie Charlot (Paris), and Aksioma (Ljubljana). His work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. The Guardian called ORDER OF MAGNITUDE one of the most telling artworks of the 21st century—“a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times”—and RTÉ dubbed Grosser an “antipreneur.”
His artworks have been cited across fields ranging from media studies and philosophy to law, psychology, and computer science. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff counts him among a “brilliant artistic vanguard” alongside Trevor Paglen and Ai Weiwei; his work also appears in Investigative Aesthetics by Fuller and Weizman, Christiane Paul’s survey Digital Art, and Geert Lovink’s Stuck on the Platform. His theoretical writing has appeared in journals such as Big Data & Society, Electronic Book Review, and Computational Culture, including the essay “What Do Metrics Want?”
Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in the VIDA Award for Art and Artificial Life (Madrid), a Net Art Grant from Rhizome (New York), and an Artist’s Fellowship in Digital Art from the Illinois Arts Council. In 2026, he left a tenured full professorship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mid-career to pursue art and research full-time. He is a Faculty Associate (and former Fellow) at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.