Ben Grosser investigates how the designs of platform interfaces—from social media to AI chatbots—shape human behavior, desire, and culture. Through tactics such as software recomposition, interface reduction, and radical reimagination, his artworks expose software’s hidden politics and propose alternatives that restore user agency.
Since 2011, Grosser has introduced ideas later taken up by platforms, exposed problems before the public reckoned with them, and built working countermodels to the logic of endless growth. His Facebook Demetricator (2012–22) introduced social media “demetrication,” hiding every visible number in the interface—from likes and friend counts to the age of posts—seven years before Instagram began testing hidden like counts. Go Rando (2017) randomized users’ Facebook “reactions” to obfuscate their emotion profiles a year before the Cambridge Analytica scandal 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 days before co-founder Chris Hughes made the same diagnosis in his call to break up the company. And Grosser’s platform 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.”
He has exhibited at venues such as Centre Pompidou (Paris), Barbican Centre (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), and CCCB (Barcelona). Solo exhibitions include arebyte Gallery (London), Galerie Charlot (Paris), and Aksioma (Ljubljana). Upcoming exhibitions include Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), Arts Santa Mònica (Barcelona), Onassis ONX (New York), Museo Franz Mayer (Mexico City), and NeMe (Cyprus).
Grosser’s artworks have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. The Guardian (UK) called ORDER OF MAGNITUDE one of the most telling artworks of the 21st century—“a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.” RTÉ (Ireland) dubbed Grosser an “antipreneur,” and Slate (US) described his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.”
His artworks have been cited in more than 100 books, 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, Christiane Paul’s survey Digital Art, and Geert Lovink’s Stuck on the Platform. His own scholarly writing includes the widely cited essay “What Do Metrics Want?” in Computational Culture and, with Søren Pold, “Reading the Praise/Prompt Machine,” an interface-criticism approach to ChatGPT.
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 artistic research full-time. He is a Faculty Associate (and former Fellow) at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.