Artist Talk: Ben Grosser
Less Metrics, More Rando: Net Art Strategies
of Resistance Against Big Tech’s Desire for More
Ben Grosser

 

Thursday, September 17th, 2020

Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibition venues include the Barbican Centre in London, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, and Galerie Charlot in Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Telegraph, El País, Libération, 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 artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, Critical Code Studies, and Technologies of Vision, as well as volumes centered on computational art practices such as Electronic Literature, The New Aesthetic and Art, and Digital Art. Grosser is an associate professor of new media and studio art in the School of Art + Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and an affiliate faculty member with the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory and the School of Information Sciences, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. https://bengrosser.com