Landscape Welcomes Ben Tear as Strategist and Programming Lead.
We’re pleased to welcome Ben Tear as Strategist & Programming Lead at Landscape.
Ben’s work moves fluidly across publishing, curatorial practice, and applied research. At Bidoun, he’s contributed to shaping critical discourse around art and culture from the Middle East. At Ratio 3, he executed risk-tolerant exhibition programming. And most recently, at TOFTH , he collaborated with engineers and artists to interrogate how emerging technologies challenge inherited categories like human, machine, and nature.
With over a decade of experience across cultural publishing, R&D visioning, and creative strategy, Ben brings a systems-level approach to thinking about art, technology, and communication. He’s worked with organizations including Stripe, Meta, and the Gates Foundation.
Creative Director of Content, Ben Bloom (BB) interviewed Ben Tear (BT) to learn more about his background.
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BB: Want to tell us about your background?
BT: I've had a lot of jobs, I’m not really a career person. I've worked as an artist assistant, cell biology researcher, at a gallery, a magazine, and most recently at a think-tank and research company focused on technology and philosophy.
BB: Tell us about the magazine?
BT: The magazine, Bidoun, is an arts and culture magazine about the Middle East and its diasporas. It’s really about a sort of inbetweeness. In its heyday it was a quarterly print magazine, now we publish online working with artists and writers, people like Bruce Hainley, Tobi Haslett, Hedi el Kholti, Meriem Bennani and Fatima Al Qadiri. We also focus a lot now on producing books, talks, and exhibitions.
BB: How was your time at Ratio 3 in San Francisco?
BT: Super cool, a lock-step team, kind of like a military drill squad, just four dudes busting it — running a gallery is a lot of work. Ratio 3 had an interesting vernacular in the SF art scene. It had a kind of punk ethos, a strong curatorial position while taking lots of risks.
BB: What about the fellowship before you came here?
BT: I was a research fellow at an organization called ToftH in Berkeley that was funded by Reid Hoffman and the Berggruen Institute. We worked with engineers in R&D departments at large tech companies, exploring how emergent technologies break with the categories that organize our understanding, big concepts like nature, society, humanity, technology.
BB: Who were some of the other people doing this with you?
BT: I was in the first year and there were eleven other fellows. We had an Austrian diplomat, the head of HCD at Google, someone who worked on tech policy in China, a post-doc studying contemporary dance, a math undergrad who studied fluid dynamics. We worked directly with leading ML engineers, roboticists, quantum computing scientists, biogeochemists and synthetic biologists. It was like a rapid absorption of some of the most exciting things you can imagine.
BB: Why were you excited to join Landscape?
BT: I love interacting with technical founders and Landscape gets amazing clients. I like that I have the opportunity to help articulate big conceptual shifts across the projects I work on. The studio is like a funnel for what's new and interesting about being alive today, so I just thought it was a really amazing opportunity. I’m also hyped to do public programming and help situate conversations and dialogues around creativity, technology, and our culture at large.
BB: Speaking of, you're heading programming at DOG as you mentioned, wanna talk about what we have in store for next year?
BT: Definitely. Super excited for this, we'll be exploring stuff like collective intelligence and how AI can be used to bolster democratic processes, bridging human and animal languages, how screens have redefined our sense of fashion through personal aesthetics, and considering planetary sensing in understanding ourselves as a total—
Ben’s work moves fluidly across publishing, curatorial practice, and applied research. At Bidoun, he’s contributed to shaping critical discourse around art and culture from the Middle East. At Ratio 3, he executed risk-tolerant exhibition programming. And most recently, at TOFTH , he collaborated with engineers and artists to interrogate how emerging technologies challenge inherited categories like human, machine, and nature.
With over a decade of experience across cultural publishing, R&D visioning, and creative strategy, Ben brings a systems-level approach to thinking about art, technology, and communication. He’s worked with organizations including Stripe, Meta, and the Gates Foundation.
Creative Director of Content, Ben Bloom (BB) interviewed Ben Tear (BT) to learn more about his background.
===
BB: Want to tell us about your background?
BT: I've had a lot of jobs, I’m not really a career person. I've worked as an artist assistant, cell biology researcher, at a gallery, a magazine, and most recently at a think-tank and research company focused on technology and philosophy.
BB: Tell us about the magazine?
BT: The magazine, Bidoun, is an arts and culture magazine about the Middle East and its diasporas. It’s really about a sort of inbetweeness. In its heyday it was a quarterly print magazine, now we publish online working with artists and writers, people like Bruce Hainley, Tobi Haslett, Hedi el Kholti, Meriem Bennani and Fatima Al Qadiri. We also focus a lot now on producing books, talks, and exhibitions.
BB: How was your time at Ratio 3 in San Francisco?
BT: Super cool, a lock-step team, kind of like a military drill squad, just four dudes busting it — running a gallery is a lot of work. Ratio 3 had an interesting vernacular in the SF art scene. It had a kind of punk ethos, a strong curatorial position while taking lots of risks.
BB: What about the fellowship before you came here?
BT: I was a research fellow at an organization called ToftH in Berkeley that was funded by Reid Hoffman and the Berggruen Institute. We worked with engineers in R&D departments at large tech companies, exploring how emergent technologies break with the categories that organize our understanding, big concepts like nature, society, humanity, technology.
BB: Who were some of the other people doing this with you?
BT: I was in the first year and there were eleven other fellows. We had an Austrian diplomat, the head of HCD at Google, someone who worked on tech policy in China, a post-doc studying contemporary dance, a math undergrad who studied fluid dynamics. We worked directly with leading ML engineers, roboticists, quantum computing scientists, biogeochemists and synthetic biologists. It was like a rapid absorption of some of the most exciting things you can imagine.
BB: Why were you excited to join Landscape?
BT: I love interacting with technical founders and Landscape gets amazing clients. I like that I have the opportunity to help articulate big conceptual shifts across the projects I work on. The studio is like a funnel for what's new and interesting about being alive today, so I just thought it was a really amazing opportunity. I’m also hyped to do public programming and help situate conversations and dialogues around creativity, technology, and our culture at large.
BB: Speaking of, you're heading programming at DOG as you mentioned, wanna talk about what we have in store for next year?
BT: Definitely. Super excited for this, we'll be exploring stuff like collective intelligence and how AI can be used to bolster democratic processes, bridging human and animal languages, how screens have redefined our sense of fashion through personal aesthetics, and considering planetary sensing in understanding ourselves as a total—
“The way narratives get defined through brand work and purposeful creative exchange with companies can place really interesting constraints on information as it becomes actionable. It's a very useful momentum.”
BB: Cool, so wait, you were talking about DOG. Let's pick that back up. Very wild mix of ideas for this year. Where do you come up with this stuff?
BT: You know I think there's this layer of discourse happening now between what makes sense for an art institution and an academic environment, I think I'm pulling a lot on that world. At Landscape, I'm focused on trying to make that discourse accessible for general audiences but especially for the people we work with.
The way narratives get defined through brand work and purposeful creative exchange with companies can place really interesting constraints on information as it becomes actionable. It's a very useful momentum. The focus is to amplify that effect through the programming at DOG this year. The ideas come out of that but it's a lot of just soliciting the people around me and asking things like “What are you into right now? Who's within reach and where can things go?”
I’m trying to focus on bringing in someone for each of the events that amplifies a key focus of the studio right now, whether that's in emergent technologies, regenerative resources, wellbeing, or the future of society.
BB: San Francisco is such a tech focused city. Does it feel like a challenge to come up with event ideas that aren't centered around tech?
BT: San Franscico is an interesting place for that, it doesn't articulate itself as a media center like LA or New York and it doesn't have the transatlantic contingency New York does with cultural appropriation from Europe. It's not really concerned with centering itself. We're on the pacific wall at the edge of America. What's so cool about DOG is that it’s been a successful gathering space to bring a lot of people together.
Trying to create a space that has such diverse programming but doesn't polarize certain groups is quite a challenge. Whereas a fine art gallery is a very specific demographic that you understand. I feel like we've always tried to appeal to this wide range, which is fun but difficult. And you start to understand who shows up on a Friday night, what kind of people they are, and we try to make sure that the programming appeals to them, but also a wider audience.
BB: Yeah I think it's really cool. I think there's a lot of active potential to just drive understanding forward.
BT: Yeah, and having a cultural hub in a city that has been criticized for losing its culture is cool because it's going against the flow of things.
The reality of SF is that there’s crazy stuff going on all over the place here but people are in the business of doing, not myth making—and it creates weird opportunities where those things surface in private or close circles. It's not this performative, social display that happens. I don't know. It creates a condition where things definitely percolate up instead of trickle down.
BB: Exactly, I think if the space was in LA or New York, the programming would be very different. How do you compete with a sneaker drop in SOHO or Stussy store grand opening?
BT: That stuff is less interesting to me
BB: If you could get rid of one technological advancement, what would it be?
BT: Cookies. Like total digital anonymity. Broadcast-era internet.
BB: What else can we talk about? Anything interesting you're reading or listening to these days?
BT: I’ve been reading this book Cute Accelerationism. It's very cute. It's tiny. [Ben holds up a tiny book] It talks about the bioevolutionary mechanisms of cuteness and how we're predispositioned by these forces in how culture and desire select and adapt for this advantage. I think it's a really interesting lens to decenter the idea of the human. Everything definately isn't here to serve us. Myths, beliefs, and narratives are “drivers” that animate us in creating the built and imagined world but ultimately we’re caught up in a very different series of processes.
BB: Wild. And a nice place to end. Welcome to Landscape, we’re excited to have you.
BT: You know I think there's this layer of discourse happening now between what makes sense for an art institution and an academic environment, I think I'm pulling a lot on that world. At Landscape, I'm focused on trying to make that discourse accessible for general audiences but especially for the people we work with.
The way narratives get defined through brand work and purposeful creative exchange with companies can place really interesting constraints on information as it becomes actionable. It's a very useful momentum. The focus is to amplify that effect through the programming at DOG this year. The ideas come out of that but it's a lot of just soliciting the people around me and asking things like “What are you into right now? Who's within reach and where can things go?”
I’m trying to focus on bringing in someone for each of the events that amplifies a key focus of the studio right now, whether that's in emergent technologies, regenerative resources, wellbeing, or the future of society.
BB: San Francisco is such a tech focused city. Does it feel like a challenge to come up with event ideas that aren't centered around tech?
BT: San Franscico is an interesting place for that, it doesn't articulate itself as a media center like LA or New York and it doesn't have the transatlantic contingency New York does with cultural appropriation from Europe. It's not really concerned with centering itself. We're on the pacific wall at the edge of America. What's so cool about DOG is that it’s been a successful gathering space to bring a lot of people together.
Trying to create a space that has such diverse programming but doesn't polarize certain groups is quite a challenge. Whereas a fine art gallery is a very specific demographic that you understand. I feel like we've always tried to appeal to this wide range, which is fun but difficult. And you start to understand who shows up on a Friday night, what kind of people they are, and we try to make sure that the programming appeals to them, but also a wider audience.
BB: Yeah I think it's really cool. I think there's a lot of active potential to just drive understanding forward.
BT: Yeah, and having a cultural hub in a city that has been criticized for losing its culture is cool because it's going against the flow of things.
The reality of SF is that there’s crazy stuff going on all over the place here but people are in the business of doing, not myth making—and it creates weird opportunities where those things surface in private or close circles. It's not this performative, social display that happens. I don't know. It creates a condition where things definitely percolate up instead of trickle down.
BB: Exactly, I think if the space was in LA or New York, the programming would be very different. How do you compete with a sneaker drop in SOHO or Stussy store grand opening?
BT: That stuff is less interesting to me
BB: If you could get rid of one technological advancement, what would it be?
BT: Cookies. Like total digital anonymity. Broadcast-era internet.
BB: What else can we talk about? Anything interesting you're reading or listening to these days?
BT: I’ve been reading this book Cute Accelerationism. It's very cute. It's tiny. [Ben holds up a tiny book] It talks about the bioevolutionary mechanisms of cuteness and how we're predispositioned by these forces in how culture and desire select and adapt for this advantage. I think it's a really interesting lens to decenter the idea of the human. Everything definately isn't here to serve us. Myths, beliefs, and narratives are “drivers” that animate us in creating the built and imagined world but ultimately we’re caught up in a very different series of processes.
BB: Wild. And a nice place to end. Welcome to Landscape, we’re excited to have you.