Featured Artist: Alexander Reben

Alexander Reben is an artist and roboticist who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology.

His work deals with human-machine relationships, synthetic psychology, artificial philosophy and robot ethics among other topics. Using “art as experiment” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts.

BlabDroid and headgasmatron Museum Tour
02.11.2019 – 23.02.2020, V&A Museum of Design, Dundee, Scotland
21.06.2019 – 29.09.2019, Museo San Telmo, San Sebastián, Spain
22.01.2019 – 19.04.2019, MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal
27.05.2018 – 04.11.2018, Gewerbemuseum Winterthur, Switzerland

“With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations,” reports NPR’s Tania Lombrozo.

Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues both internationally including The Vitra Design Museum, Ars Electronica, Volta, The Whitney Biennial, TFI Interactive, IDFA, ArtBots, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery.

His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and Wired among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT and other universities.

Reben has built robots for NASA and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He is a 2016-2017 WIRED innovation fellow, was awarded a Stochastic Labs Residency, and is a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.


 


tedxsf

10/9 TEDx SF

“Five Dollars Will Save Planet Earth” was completely written by a computer artificial intelligence that was trained on a data set of TED talks.
At TEDx SF, artist Alex Reben will transform himself into a cyborg by donning a robotic mask which will give the A.I.’s presentation automatically through him. This represents a turning-point in human-computer symbiosis by effectively turning the artist into an output device of a computer.