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Maurice Benayoun (AKA MoBen) is a pioneering new-media artist whose work has been seen, and honored, around the globe. Born in Mascara, Algeria, in 1957, Benayoun is based in Paris, where he lives with his wife and daughter. His work employs various media — including (and often combining) video, virtual reality, the Web, wireless technology, performance, public-space large-scale art installations and interactive exhibitions.

During the 1980s, Benayoun directed video installations and short films about contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Sol LeWitt and Martial Raysse. That work introduced the concept of Situation developed later by Benayoun in other media as a means to expand understanding of symbolic contexts through immersion in multimedia environments.

In order to explore the potential of emerging artistic tools, Benayoun co-founded Z-A in 1987, a cutting-edge computer graphics and Virtual Reality lab that became the site of many award-winning projects. For over 15 years Z-A was dedicated to exploring new territories in computer animation, interactivity and real-time graphics.

Between 1990 and 1993, Benayoun collaborated with Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten on Quarxs , the first High Definition TV 3D computer graphics series to be given awards globally. This series played with 3D realism as an unexpected way to question scientific truth and distortion.

In 1993, he received the Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs for his Art After Museum project, a contemporary art collection of virtual reality. The project's premise is to invite contemporary artists to produce new works in situ in the virtual, i.e. with the specific constraints of the virtual space. From 1994 on, Benayoun created virtual-reality and interactive-art installations, starting with Big Questions : Is God Flat? , Is the Devil Curved? , And what about me? , using dynamic virtual space to propose a new kind of situation qualified by Jean-Paul Fargier in Le Monde (1994) as "the first Metaphysical Video Game".

After 1993, he starts creating Virtual Reality and interactive art installations. Among them, in 1995, the Tunnel under the Atlantic, televirtual project linking the Pompidou centre, in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Montreal. By digging inside collective memory to effect a meeting of the two venues, this large-scale installation remains one of the first symbolic rendez-vous in virtual space.

In 1998, Benayoun won the Golden Nica at Ars Electronica, in the Interactive Art category, for World Skin, a Photo Safari in the Land of War . World Skin and The Tunnel are considered by critics to be key works in the field of interactive art — authentic artistic appropriations of technology introducing the concept of symbolic situation .

The more recent works develop the idea of “critical fusion”, mixing symbolic fiction and reality in order to make visible the limits of the real world.

Watch Out! In Seoul (2002) investigated the idea of converting passers by on streets into ordinary Big Brothers. With the same intention, Mechanics of Emotions include music performance, sculptures, gallery installations and vending machines that present the artist's work in a way that suggests the real job of the artist is to deal emotions like others deal drugs. These works play with the ambiguity of mass media and networked communication to create a scenario in which human emotions, in an artist's hands, become a convertible currency that sustains a profitable business model.

Seeking the limits of what he calls architectures of communication , Benayoun has been involved in many large-scale exhibitions, events and architecture projects. The Navigation Room (1997) and The Membrane (2001) — which introduced the concept of "organic exhibition design" — were created for the Cité des Sciences de la Villette. The Navigation Room is probably the very first network exhibition that proposed, through an innovative interface, highly personalized visits and content, ending with a web page dedicated to each visitor. The Membrane — the core of the exhibition Man Transformed — was a large surface breathing and feeling the presence of the visitors. The innovative interface had cells of information that acted like living organisms, reflecting the rhythm of the dialogue between visitors and the exhibition. The Panoramic Tables for the Planet of Visions pavilion for Hanover EXPO2000, directed by Schuiten, was an innovative application of augmented reality and the starting point of Benayoun's exploration of the potential of mixing the virtual and the physical world.

Benayoun conceived and directed the exhibition Cosmopolis, Overwriting the City (2005), a giant art and science immersive installation presented in the frame of the French Year in China. He is presently in charge of the permanent exhibition of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, attempting to shift the meaning of the monument toward a reflection on symbolic architecture.

Since 1984, Benayoun has been teaching video and media art at the Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). He was artist-in-residence at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, National Fine Arts School of Paris. He is co-founder and art director of the CITU research center (Création Interactive Transdisciplinaire Universitaire) Universités Paris 1 and Paris 8 dedicated to research and creation (R&C) in the emerging forms of art.