Alexander Reben is an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work probes the entangled relationship between humanity and technology, using what he calls artificial philosophy, synthetic psychology and perceptual manipulation. NPR's Tania Lombrozo has written that his work “forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations”.
Reben has been coding since elementary school, drawn to the way code can produce seemingly magical results purely through logic.He graduated from the MIT Media Lab in 2010, where he studied human-robot symbiosis.,His thesis centered on a robot he built called Boxie, which combined simple actions to appear alive and intelligent.He has also built robots for NASA and been a 2016–2017 WIRED innovation fellow.
In 2018 he created the Thought Render Series, fractal works generated from his own brainwaves and body signals. For each piece, a computer algorithm generated an adjective-noun phrase for him to think about while an EEG and other sensors recorded his reactions. That data fed an Iterated Function System fractal generator, with the color palette drawn from a Google image search on the phrase.In 2019 an AI-generated face series using his brainwaves, gaze and body signals, made with a model by Joel Simon and Artbreeder, was shown as augmented-reality cards at the Ars Electronica Festival.That year he also joined Ahmed Elgammal, Casey Reas, Mario Klingemann and others in the exhibition “Art in the Age of AI” at Founders Forum in London.For “Game of Life: Emergence in Generative Art”, a 2020 tribute exhibition, he reprogrammed Conway's Game of Life in a work titled puritan_communion, adding rules that let cells shift color over time instead of switching only between black and white.,In 2021 he opened the exhibition “AI-Mazing” at Gazelli Art House in London, showing works generated from descriptions the language model GPT-3 wrote for imaginary artworks and then commissioned from artists around the world. That September he released 36 one-of-one NFTs from the Thought Render Series on OpenSea.
