Benjamin Grosser

ISEA Bio(s) Available:

• ISEA2020

  Artist Ben Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software. What does it mean for human creativity when a computational system can paint its own artworks? How is an interface that foregrounds our friend count changing our conceptions of friendship? Who benefits when a software system can intuit how we feel? 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 is an Associate Professor of New Media in the School of Art + Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and a faculty affiliate in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the School of Information Sciences, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to Grosser’s current appointments, he earned an MFA in new media and an MM in music composition (both from Illinois), and was the Director of the Imaging Technology Group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.

  ISEA2015

  Benjamin Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political implications of software. Recent exhibitions include Eyebeam in New York, The White Building in London, and Museum Ludwig in Cologne. His works have been featured in Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Corriere della Sera, El País, and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.” Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in VIDA 16, the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter Filmwinter, and a commission from Rhizome.

Website:

• https://bengrosser.com/

Last Known Location:

• United States of America