Michael Benson: podcast appearances and interviews

Michael Benson, born on March 31, 1962, is an author, artist, and filmmaker known for his diverse creative practice across multiple media. His work includes large-format photographic prints, nonfiction books, essays, illustrated books, films, and visual effects sequences. Benson has engaged with the avant-garde movements of the Soviet Union and former Yugoslavia, which he documented through feature articles for Rolling Stone magazine and an award-winning feature-length documentary film titled Predictions of Fire in 1995. In the 2000s, he shifted his focus toward exploring the intersection of art and science. Over the past two decades, Benson has curated large-scale exhibitions of digitally constructed planetary landscapes exhibited in major international museums and has held solo shows in galleries in New York and London. His recent publication, Nanocosmos, released in 2025 by Abrams, investigates natural design at microscopic scales using scanning electron microscope technologies. The book was produced at the Canadian Museum of Nature and was praised for its exploration of infinitesimal landscapes and human visual exploration of the physical world. Benson’s earlier works include Space Odyssey, a detailed examination of the making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, published in 2018 to coincide with the film's 50th anniversary, and Cosmigraphics, published in 2014, which surveys four thousand years of humanity’s visual representations of the universe. He has also participated in an international lunar time capsule project called Sanctuary, which aims to land a collection of curated human achievements on the Moon, a project supported by NASA. Benson has contributed articles to several prominent publications and is recognized as a Fellow of the New York Institute of the Humanities and a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Media Lab.