As the founder and CEO of the world’s largest social media corporation, what does Mark Zuckerberg think about? While we get clues from his posts on Facebook and elsewhere, a primary window into this question is through his public video recorded appearances. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018, these recordings reveal what’s changed and what hasn’t changed about the way he speaks and what he says. For ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, I viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favored words: “more,” “grow,” and his every utterance of a metric such as “two million” or “one billion.” The result is a nearly fifty minute film that reveals primary topics of focus for the tech CEO, acting as a lens on what he cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.
Short GIF from ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (download as a video)
Exhibitions
ORDER OF MAGNITUDE premiered in 2019 as part of arebyte On Screen (AOS) in an edition curated by David Quiles Guilló. Subsequent exhibitions have included:
- Software for Less, Aksioma Inst for Contemp Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia
- Living by Protocol, Harvard Art Museum, Cambridge, US
- Information Wants to be Free?, ADM Gallery, Singapore
- SXSW, Austin, US
- Réseaux-Mondes / The Wrong TV, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France
- Through the Mesh, NeMe Arts Center, Cypress
- Japan Media Arts Festival, Miraikan, Tokyo, Japan
- 24/7, Somerset House, London, UK
- The Wrong TV, 180 Media Lab, Porto, Portugal
- Software for Less, arebyte Gallery, London, UK
- B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, Frankfurt, Germany
- GOGBOT Festival 2020, Enschede, Netherlands
- Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco, US
- Commiserate Chicago, MADD Center, University of Chicago, US
- Please don’t stand in the middle of the road waiting for me to get you on camera, (online)
- Portrait of Zuck at Galerie Manqué, Brooklyn, US
- The Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
ORDER OF MAGNITUDE at arebyte Gallery, London, 2021
photo by Ollie Rudkin
Currently, the work is on view as part of Living by Protocol at the Harvard Art Museum in Cambridge, and my solo exhibition at Aksioma Institute of Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Press
The Guardian / Observer
When the history of the first decades of this century comes to be written, there will be few more telling artworks than Ben Grosser’s film Order of Magnitude. … a mesmerising monologue, the story of our times.
—The Guardian / Observer (UK), 2021
Some of the press links listed below are to reviews of Software for Less, my 2021 solo show at arebyte Gallery in London, others are to reviews of 24/7, a group exhibition at Somerset House in London in which ORDER OF MAGNITUDE was a part. For either, I’ve only listed those that discuss the film. The remaining links are feature articles about the film. Also see this 2020 list of quotes about the film, from both articles and individuals.
- The Guardian / Observer: How artist Ben Grosser is cutting Mark Zuckerberg down to size
- Hyperallergic (US): An Exhibition That Helps Us Rethink Our Relationship to Facebook
- RTÉ (Ireland Public Radio) — Culture File: Software for Less (Parts 1/2/3)
- The Guardian: “24/7: A Wake-Up Call for Our Non-Stop World review”
- New Scientist: “Non-stop nightmare: Disturbing show weighs impact of 24/7 world”
- Financial Times: “24/7 at Somerset House: keeping step with the march of time”
- VICE: “Have We Gone Too Far to Ever Switch Off?”
- La Stampa: “’24/7′ una mostra ci urla che è ora di spegnare la luce”
- Creative Review: “24/7 at Somerset House examines the perils of non-stop culture”
- Boing Boing: “Mark Zuckerberg: More, Grow, More, More, Grow (a supercut)”
- Hackaday: “Art Project Analyzes Every Public Recording of Facebook’s CEO Since 2004”
- Fast Company: “This supercut of Mark Zuckerberg promising Facebook growth is literal art”
Interviews
Acknowledgements
Thanks to The Zuckerberg Files, an archive of Mark Zuckerberg-related materials from the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I was able to draw on many transcripts they have produced as part of their work, and I will be offering external materials I’ve acquired back to their archive. More broadly, I drew from hundreds of clips in the making of this work; producers, creators, and posters of that material are acknowledged in the end credits of the film.
ORDER OF MAGNITUDE screenshots of Zuckerberg from 2004-2018