Ben Pulver
Ben Pulver is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. His research examines the history of cybernetics and telematics through art and visual culture, focusing on how artists engaged critically and creatively with emerging systems of communication and control. As cybernetics laid the groundwork for what we now call artificial intelligence (AI), Ben explores its early development at the intersection of aesthetics and systems theory, particularly in postwar France.
His dissertation titled "Cybernetics to Telematics, Narratives of Technology and the State: a History of French Art at the Threshold of Dysfunction, 1968–1985" traces the entanglement of cybernetics and aesthetics. Attending to the way cybernetics ‘found form’ in the public imagination—through art, theory, and oppositional movements such as the Situationist International, his work locates cybernetics in the extended apparatus of French colonial statecraft, and develops an aesthetic theory of ‘dysfunction’ that highlights a fear of disorder reflected at the level of administration and language in France’s colonial enterprise.
He is a 2025–2026 Graduate Research Fellow at the Centre for Culture and Technology (formerly the McLuhan Centre) on the 2026 theme “Artificial Stupidity,” a Junior Fellow at Massey College (2022–2027), and a Graduate Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society (2026-2027). His research with the Schwartz Reisman Institute extends his PhD research into its contemporary domains of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), examining the political, technological, and aesthetic conditions shaping AI-generated imagery and computational creativity. Drawing on cybernetics, information theory, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind, his work explores how generative AI systems are reshaping cultural production and contemporary understandings of creativity and intelligence.
His research has received major support from a SSHRC CGS-Doctoral Award and a France Cluster Award with collaboration at INHA in Paris. In 2024, Ben was recipient of the Moira Whalen Prize at Massey College, which “recognizes one or several Junior Fellows who have embodied the spirit and the ethos of the college.” The award recognized his contributions, from his volunteering and Apprenticeship at the Bib Room Letterpress Studio, editing and publishing the literary and arts journal Audeamus, reinvigorating the Community Service Committee where he co-organized events such as preparing and serving food for community members in need and clothing drives, and released a podcast with the The JCR on the impacts of ChatGPT on different fields of graduate students’ work.
He has presented his research at the Centre for Culture and Technology (Toronto, 2026), at Massey College's 'Beyond the Human' lecture series with his paper 'Cybernetic Turtles, Neural Nets, and Choreographies for the Future' (Toronto, 2026), and at Sorbonne 1 on cybernetic aesthetics and AI between France and Canada (Paris, 2025), and recently with the Machine Visual Culture research group at Bibliotheca Hertziana for its “Noisy Systems: Aesthetics, Epistemology, and Computation” conference on with his work Slop in the Machine: Art, Computers, and Kitsch (Rome, 2026). He also recently presented a talk titled “Cybernetic Images/Imaginaries,” and an experimental zine by the same title at the House of Annetta in London, England, for the art exhibition “New Heretics,” (London, 2026) (pdf of the zine available here: https://benpulver.github.io/art.html#heretics, just click the dropdown ‘read the zine’).
He maintains a mixed media art practice, somewhat separate, though sometimes intertwined with his academic work. Samples of his short creative writing and other work can be found on his website (in progress) here: https://benpulver.github.io/. Full CV also available on the website.
If you are interested in talking or collaborating, please reach out via email!
