ORDER OF MAGNITUDE
Ben Grosser

2019, Total Running Time: 47:15
Streaming Continuously

September 9th – 28th, 2020
Artist-talk: Thursday, Sept. 17th, 5:00pm (PDT)

A timely portrait of Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, constructed from a systematic sampling of his use of words about growth and numbers.

As leader 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, Grosser 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.

Bio:

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