About

Alexander Reben builds machines that ask what it means to be human. A palm-sized cardboard robot that coaxes strangers into confessions they would never make to another person. A robot that decides, entirely on its own, whether to draw blood, the first machine deliberately built to break Asimov's First Law. A painting robot installed at Christie's that covered more of its canvas as the bidding climbed. For more than a decade, through absurdity, humor, and mischief, his work has probed the inherently human nature of the artificial.

Reben is among the first computational artists to fold generative AI into a studio practice, working with artificial intelligence since 2012 and with OpenAI's language models since 2019, before their public release. In the resulting AI Am I? series, the AI describes artworks that do not exist and Reben makes them real, a reversal of the usual order of imagination and execution. The series grew into his first solo museum retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum (2023–24), whose centerpiece, the bronze sculpture The Sentinel of Memory in the Valley of Vulnerability, became the first AI-generated work to enter the museum's permanent collection.

In 2024, Reben served as OpenAI's first artist in residence, working with tools including the Sora video model ahead of public release, and he subsequently held a residency at Meta. In 2025, his Untitled Robot Painting anchored Augmented Intelligence at Christie's, the first AI-dedicated sale at a major auction house, painted live at Rockefeller Center by a robot that responded to the rising bids. With the metal-forming robots of Machina Labs he created AI and the Anvil, spoken language transformed into sculpted steel, the centerpiece of his 2024 solo exhibition at Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.

In 2026, Reben co-founded Phyzify, an AI lab building what he calls infrastructure for imagination: a pipeline that carries human creative intent all the way through to manufactured physical things. It is the natural extension of a practice that has always insisted ideas belong in the world, not on the screen.

Reben studied applied mathematics at Stony Brook University and social robotics at the MIT Media Lab, where he researched human–machine symbiosis. His Media Lab robot Boxie has been cited as an inspiration for Baymax in Disney's Big Hero 6, and his BlabDroid documentary robots produced the first films shot and directed by robots. He has built robots for NASA, served as director of technology and research at Stochastic Labs in Berkeley, and has been a WIRED Innovation Fellow, a visiting scholar in the psychology department at UC Berkeley, and an affiliate of Harvard's metaLAB.

His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Ars Electronica, the Vitra Design Museum, the MAK Museum Vienna, the Vienna Biennale, and in the touring exhibition Hello, Robot, and it appears on the cover of the 13th edition of Prebles' Artforms. It has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, the BBC, CNN, WIRED, and Fast Company, among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, Google, MIT, and UC Berkeley.

Reben resists calling his process a collaboration with machines; the word, he argues, gives too much away to systems that remain deeply constrained. He prefers symbiosis: an entanglement in which the artificial and the human have always shaped one another, and in which his art acts as the experiment.