Alexander Reben joins Google as artist in residence
What can an artist discover about a technology that its makers might overlook?
We are delighted to announce Reben’s new artist residency at Google in 2026. Following his appointment as OpenAI’s first artist in residence in 2023–2024, and residencies at Facebook Open Arts in 2021 and Meta in 2025, this marks another significant chapter in his sustained engagement with the companies developing technologies that increasingly shape our lives.
Google has supported artistic experimentation with emerging technologies for more than a decade. Its Arts & Culture Lab residency program, running since 2014, supports artists and creative coders in exploring cultural questions and developing new ways for audiences to experience culture. Across its initiatives, artists work with technical teams to investigate possibilities that emerge when creative inquiry meets technological research.
“I ask questions by building them,” Reben writes. An artist and roboticist trained at MIT, he is drawn to technologies whose possibilities remain open and whose assumptions have yet to become familiar enough to escape notice. Working across robotics, AI, software, sculpture, and performance, he builds situations in which questions about creativity, authorship, and responsibility become something we can experience. Humor and absurdity invite us in; participation makes us part of the question.
Google’s Charleston East campus in Mountain View, California. Source: google.com
In AI Am I?, a language model imagines artworks, artists, and critics, and Reben realizes selected works in physical form. An imagined art world enters the actual one, raising questions about where art-making happens as an idea passes between a computational system and the person who gives it material existence.
In Ghost Currents (2026), currently presented in EMERGENCE at Kate Vass Galerie, that interest in our relationship with machines takes another form. Conway’s Game of Life unfolds through dark cells whose births and deaths disturb a surrounding fluid simulation. We perceive their activity through drifting smoke, swirling currents, and sudden storms. The work also senses movement in the room, allowing viewers to enter this changing atmosphere. Their movements mingle with the system’s own disturbances until it becomes difficult to tell which currents belong to whom.
That uncertainty is deliberate. As the atmosphere shifts, the system can begin to feel as though it is answering us. Reben invites us to notice how readily we grant intention to a machine, and how that belief changes our behavior. Across these works, the human response becomes inseparable from the technology being examined.
Reben’s practice has been presented at Ars Electronica, MAK, and the Vitra Design Museum, with his first solo museum retrospective, AI Am I?, held at the Crocker Art Museum in 2023–2024. His new Google residency continues this inquiry into the systems we build and the relationships we form with them, bringing an artist’s questions into the places where those technologies take shape.
"You learn what a system is by living downstream of it for a while." - Alexander Reben
Alex Reben, Ghost Currents, 2026. Exhibited at EMERGENCE, Kate Vass Galerie, Zürich, Switzerland, 2026.