SXSW Art Program Installation - “ORDER OF MAGNITUDE” by Ben Grosser
Called "freakish" by Boing Boing, "literal art" by Fast Company, and "a hilarious satire on 24/7 overlords" by The Guardian, ORDER OF MAGNITUDE is an epic supercut that chronicles Silicon Valley's 21st century obsession with growth. The film starts from this question: what does Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg most care about? While we get clues from his posts on Facebook and elsewhere, a primary window into this question is through his public video recorded appearances. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018 and beyond, these recordings reveal what’s changed and what hasn’t changed about the way he speaks and what he says. For ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, artist Ben Grosser viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favored words: “more,” “grow,” and his every utterance of a metric such as “two million” or “one billion.” The result is a nearly fifty minute film that reveals primary topics of focus for the tech CEO, acting as a lens on what he cares about, how he thinks, and what he hopes to attain.
Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.