Speaker: Ben Grosser

Title: Less Metrics, More Rando, and Faint Praise: Net Art as Software Research

Abstract: From the quantitative like counts of social media apps to the qualitative affirmations of AI chatbots, the designs of today’s platform interfaces profoundly shape user behavior, interaction, and experience. This talk will present a series of artworks that intervene in, reflect on, and reimagine altogether the apps and websites we use every day. Through methods such as software recomposition, interface reduction, data obfuscation, and core logic inversion, these projects investigate and reconfigure the computational systems at the heart of 21st century digital culture. Spanning browser extensions that demetricate social interfaces, epic supercuts of tech CEO obsessions, and a social network that’s happy to see you go, these projects challenge the negative effects of today’s platform designs and propose alternative technological landscapes that center human agency over ever-growing appetites for data extraction and induced engagement.

Bio: Ben Grosser focuses on the cultural, social, and political effects of software. Recent exhibitions include Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Barbican in London, ZKM in Karlsruhe, SXSW in Austin, and the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery in Los Angeles. Grosser’s projects have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. His artworks are regularly cited in books investigating the cultural effects of technology, including The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, The Metainterface, and Investigative Aesthetics. Grosser is Professor of New Media in UIUC’s School of Art & Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at NCSA, and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.