Ben Grosser will challenge you to think about the relationship between a software platform’s design and the effects it has on you. How does the presence of a “like” or follower count on Twitter influence which posts or users you most value? What are the effects of sharing how you feel using “reactions” on Facebook? Does an algorithmic feed on TikTok change the way you see the world? Ben Grosser uses art to investigate questions like these, making projects that tease out answers and provide users with agency to find answers themselves. One example is his project The Endless Doomscroller—a work inspired by events of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic—that presents a stripped-down version of social media in those early pandemic days, showing how the structures of those platforms and their drive to keep us “engaged” produced a never ending stream of bad news headlines. Other projects of his take on today’s software landscape from alternative angles, including a new social platform where users get only 100 opportunities to post in a lifetime. “I like to mess with things. To me, it’s an important way of navigating the world of technology. So much of our experience of the digital is about conforming to it, adapting to it,” concluded Grosser. “I reject that adapting to the system is the only way of contending with technology. Manipulation, experimentation, and play are the tactics I advise.”
Ben Grosser, who also has affiliated appointments with the iSchool, NCSA (where he has co-founded the Critical Technology Studies Lab), and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, focuses his research on the cultural effects of software, social media, surveillance, computer vision, computational agency, and data obfuscation.
