معرفی
Ben Grosser is Professor of New Media at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign with cross-appointments across multiple academic units. His primary affiliations include the School of Art and Design, School of Music, Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. He also maintains an external affiliation as Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Grosser holds an MFA in New Media and MM/BM in Music Composition, all from the University of Illinois. His research investigates how platform interface designs—from social media to AI chatbots—shape human behavior, desire, and culture through tactics like software recomposition, interface reduction, and radical reimagination. His work exposes software's hidden politics while proposing alternatives that restore user agency, with research areas spanning computational surveillance, data obfuscation, and AI platform critique.
His artistic projects have been exhibited internationally at prestigious venues including Centre Pompidou (Paris), Somerset House (London), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), and Japan Media Arts Festival (Tokyo). Major works include ORDER OF MAGNITUDE (called a 'definitive artwork of the 21st century' by The Guardian), Demetricator, Computers Watching Movies, minus.social, and Stuck in the Scroll (2024). His scholarship appears in Computational Culture, Electronic Book Review, and Big Data and Society.
- First Prize in VIDA 16
- Net Art Grant from Rhizome
- Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter Filmwinter
- Artist's Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council
- Honorary Fellowship at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center
Grosser co-founded the Critical Technology Studies Lab at NCSA and maintains active research collaborations examining the cultural effects of technology, with his work cited in influential texts including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Metainterface. His critical perspective on platform design has generated significant media attention through features in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, and international outlets like Le Monde and Der Spiegel.
His creative practice functions as both artistic intervention and scholarly contribution, with recent projects like Stuck in the Scroll serving as public confessional tools to examine compulsive platform behaviors while proposing alternative digital social structures through platforms like minus.social that reject data monetization and endless scrolling paradigms.
