Benjamin Gaulon is an artist, researcher, educator and cultural producer based in Paris. He has worked under the name "recyclism" since 2001. His research focuses on the limits and failures of information and communication technologies; planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society; ownership and privacy; through the exploration of détournement, hacking and recycling. His projects can be softwares, installations..., pieces of hardware, web based projects, interactive works, street art interventions and are, when applicable, open source.
Together with Dasha Ilina, he is a founding member of the collective NØ, a non-profit organisation whose mission is to support and promote emerging art and design research and practices that address the social and environmental impact of information and communication technologies in France and beyond, since its creation in 2018. They are both co-directors of NØ SCHOOL NEVERS since its first edition in 2019. With Vincent Valéry, artist and self-taught botanist, he co-founded the Internet of Living Things Institute (IoLT), a research platform that combines electronic waste and living organisms in symbiotic, at times parasitic, experiments.
He is currently completing a practice-based PhD by prior publication at Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin), centred on what he calls "feral media": technology that has escaped the function it was built for.
He teaches as adjunct faculty at Sciences Po (Reims campus, Introduction to Digital Culture, since 2021), at École normale supérieure Paris-Saclay for the Année de Recherche en Recherche-Création (ARRC, since 2021), and at CentraleSupélec - Université Paris-Saclay in the Science, Technology and Society program of the Department of Social and Human Sciences (since 2018). He is also adjunct professor at CY école de design (since 2025), where he teaches electronics, physical computing, hacking and recycling, and DIY and DIWO practices, and a recurring guest lecturer at HEAD Genève (since 2022), where he leads the Tech Mining intensive for the Master in Media Design.
He was assistant professor at Parsons Paris, where he was the program director of the MFA Design + Technology and the BFA Art, Media and Technology, program that he has developed and launched in 2013. Before that he was lecturer at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, associate researcher at CTVR / the telecommunications research centre at Trinity College and director of DATA (Dublin Art and Technology Association) in Dublin, where he also co-founded IMOCA (Irish Museum of Contemporary Art) in 2007.
