Benjamin Grosser

A composer by training, Benjamin Grosser is interested in the ways software shapes our behaviour. His works – browser extensions, websites, autonomous machines – make the invisible logics of platforms visible and invite us to break free of them.

Facebook Demetricator (since 2012) erases the counts of likes, shares and friends to question our dependence on metrics; ScareMail (2013) peppers emails with ‘alarming’ words to scramble NSA surveillance; Computers Watching Movies (2013) shows what a computer vision system ‘watches’ in cult films. The press has hailed it as ‘creative civil disobedience for the digital age’.

His work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, ZKM, the Louisiana Museum, the Barbican, Somerset House, Eyebeam and the Japan Media Arts Festival. Winner of the first prize at VIDA 2016, he is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. Galerie Charlot devoted the exhibition SYSTEMS UNDER LIBERTY (2015) to his work.