IAN CHENG

The universe is relentlessly bleak.
An exploding star wipes out vast populations of who knows what.
Here: Earthquake. Tsunami. Polar melt. Meteor shower.
The second law of thermal dynamics says things move from order to disorder.
Skyscraper to rubble. Humpty to dumpty. Fuck yes to fuck.
Entropy reigns.

Probability that nature cares about homo sapiens: 0%

Life is improbable but happens.
Natural selection improbably produces the highest order of order, an organism, and keeps it from crumbling into inert material for as long as it can.
Entropy-delay.
Culture emerges as a self-stabilizing force to socialize entropy-delay for populations of homo sapiens.
On the one hand: "We hate change, we hate aging."
On the other: "The singularity is near."

Probability that culture will delay death: 64%

Certain populations campaign against the culture of entropy-delay.
Terrorists. Drones. Hysteric celebrities. Jokers. Undead artists.
Entropy-accelerators born again in a world unnaturally stabilized by culture.
Romantic in the mind but hard to deal with when you have a body.

Probability that entropy-acceleration will trend as a lifestyle choice: 0.2%

Dealing with life means dealing with uncertainty in spite of culture.
We know now that the uncertainties produced by the entropic forces of reality have a secret shape.
Bayesian probability, simulation, flow, are tools to model this shape.
A culture bathed in these tools can come to recognize and wrangle the shape of uncertainty -- like lungs wrangling the chaotic dispersal of oxygen molecules inside us every moment.
Over time, we begin to unnaturally perceive entropy without fear, delay, or reactionary embrace.
We can even come to love it unromantically.

Probability that a future culture necessitates evolving our relationship to entropy: 99%

Modeling the look and feel of entropy management:

The exhibition premieres a live computer simulation that changes and evolves, forever.
A set of objects assigned a set of properties unleashed on each other. Entropy reigns. Symbols decompose. Choreographies emerge. Assemblages assemble and die. Available now at Off Vendome. Coming soon for iOS and Android.

And, a suite of shape-shifting material things:
- a vacuum sealed cephalopod. Its dead body deprived of oxygen, forever delaying aerobic decay. Nitrogen released from anaerobic decay reinflates the vacuum seal from inside out, dynamically changing the display's form in 30 days or less. In a million years: a packet of oil.
- a vacuum sealed explosion of emergency chili con carne. Transforms from 2D painting to 3D sculpture in 30 days or less as anaerobic nitrogen emissions kick in. In a million years: a packet of chili oil.
- a live burner phone submerged in oil. Now accepting txt msgs and voicemails. + 49 01525 2639266

TWO HUMANS ALL TOO HUMANS
January 6 -- February 24, 2013
The Vanity, Los Angeles

In Death in Technological Time, Margaret Lock talks about how to locate the end of a meaningful life. Debates about technologically manipulated death became institutionalized in the 60's when the first life respirators were invented. Now there was "brain death" versus "body death", and increasingly, it became difficult to determine to what degree someone was dead.

Both the scientific and the intuitive criteria for death fail to find an end point, but we do know that our bodies are in a continual state of mutation.

500 million years ago bone emerged in mammals and it determined that in the most basic way, the site we as humans are designed for is the ground. You could say that we are born to consume oxygen and walk around, grow some bone, and die all as a mechanism to redeposit our bone back into the mineral-sucking ground. All we are is a means to mutate material. Or, in the intuitive sense, you could say we are made for the mutations we make (babies, ideas, things).

Every other instance in the world can also be measured on a transverse gradient to see the degree to which mutation is intuitive or scientific. The human is a mutated animal that relentlessly defines itself through a symbol system. But what if it's symbols --Bugs, Elmer-- dropped the need to communicate human meaning: A classic choreography simulated against a classic choreography leaves only an opportunity for these aging symbols to mutate together, attaching and doubling, killing and being killed, fucking and being fucked, as biological organisms do.

--Rachel Rose 1/1/2013

YOU TOLD ME THE OTHER NIGHT
April 5, 2012 --
West Street Gallery, 395 West Street, NYC

This Papaya Tastes Perfect (Matt Moravec iPhone edition), 2012
Matt Moravec's iPhone [391 contacts, 774 songs, 13 photos, 1 video]

IAN CHENG
THIS PAPAYA TASTES PERFECT
August 25 - October 6, 2011
Opening Reception Thursday, August 25, 7-9 PM

Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club is proud to present THIS PAPAYA TASTES PERFECT, a solo exhibition by Ian Cheng.

IT'S 2011. THE TWIN TOWERS OF REASON AND TASTE STILL SHINE DOWN UPON ALL POSITIONS. BUT SOMETHING ANCIENT LURKS.

I remember now.
Somewhere in the dark between Wall Street and Chinatown.
A crowd of futures traders gathers outside a bar to watch something. Something alive.

The exhibition premieres a new digitized performance that sets a sequence of encounters between physical human behavior and the virtual environment.

WHEN INFINITY ABANDONS NATURE FOR CULTURE, POSSESSION EVOLVES INTO ACCESS, INNOVATION SCALES INTO YOUR PALM, DATA CAN BE TOUCHED. TOUCHED! YOU START TO THINK ABOUT YOU. ABOUT YOUR IMMEDIATE NEEDS, DESIRES, FANTASIES. THE PROGRESS OF PROGRESS AWAKENS A BARBAROUS SOMETHING. IN OUR ERA, THE HOMO SAPIEN RETURNS.

There's a man and a woman, lovers.
Both tall, muscular, dyed blonde. Drunken warriors from the same tribe.
They've forced an alien driver to stop his car in the middle of the street.

Motion Capture is a recording process that registers the physical movements of the performer absent the image of the performer. The recorded movements are then translated onto a digital body. In Hollywood, motion capture is used to give impossible non-human characters an anthropomorphic spirit.

AMONG OUR BRIGHTEST DIGITAL CELEBRITIES--GOLLUM, KING KONG, THE NA'VI--YOU SEE PERFORMANCES AT THE THRESHOLD BETWEEN POLITE REASONABLE HUMANITY AND EXPLOSIVE BEHAVIORAL DRIVE. UNLIKE OUR HUMAN STARS, WHO HAVE FULL RECOURSE TO A PRIVATE LIFE OF SEXUAL AFFAIRS, SHOPLIFTING, DRUNKEN TIRADES, PHARMACEUTICALS, GAFFES, RETIRING AND REBIRTHING, THESE DIGITAL CELEBRITIES MUST PUT ALL THEIR LATENT MONSTER ON SCREEN. THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO HIGHLIGHT A FLICKERING INNER HUMANITY AMIDST MONSTROUS DIFFERENCE. BUT IF YOU BLUR YOUR EYES, THEIR TRUE FREEDOM IS TO BEHAVE AS DUMB AS YOU YOURSELF SOMETIMES DESIRE TO BEHAVE.

Working with a choreographer, a performer, and a small team of motion capture technicians, Cheng has configured the motion capture process into a format for recording a visceral, incomplete memory.

I don't remember what their story is, but they're screaming it.
The driver tries to reason but they can read the fear in his body.
They want the blood.

CERTAIN CONDITIONS CAN ANIMATE THE HUMAN BODY INTO A HOMO SAPIEN MONSTROSITY, 200 MILLISECONDS BEFORE THE CONSCIOUS MIND CAN REASON AND 600 MILLISECONDS BEFORE TASTE CAN ASSURE THAT IT IS PERMITTED. CERTAIN HUMAN BEHAVIORS CAN CONFUSE THE COMPUTER, CAUSING AN ENTROPIC CHAIN OF DIGITAL MISBEHAVIOR AND AN ACCUMULATION OF DIRTY DATA.

Placing the performer under a matrix of contradictory choreographies, a debased narrative, whiskey, and technical bondage, an ancient horrifying physicality is registered in the virtual environment as a sequence of legible movements punctuated by impossible gestures and gross deformations. In this space, motion becomes a new material.

It's cat and cat and mouse in and around the car.
The traders are too scared to intervene, but they also yearn for something raw.
The car is cast as an impromptu mediator, protracting the inevitable moment.
What happens next I have to play out for you. I don't remember the details, but my body does.

TO CALIBRATE YOUR BODY TO THE COMPUTER AND THE COMPUTER TO YOUR BODY, STAND CRUCIFIED AND SPEAK IN YOUR EVERYDAY VOICE: "THIS PAPAYA TASTES PERFECT."

Ian Cheng (born 1984, Los Angeles) is an artist based in New York. He studied Cognitive Science at UC Berkeley before working at Industrial Light & Magic. He received an MFA from Columbia University in 2009.

Gallery hours are Wednesday -- Sunday 11am -- 6pm. For additional information and images please contact the gallery by telephone or at the following email address: info@formalistsidewalkpoetryclub.com.

FORMALIST SIDEWALK POETRY CLUB
WWW.FORMALISTSIDEWALKPOETRYCLUB.COM
235 12TH STREET, MIAMI BEACH, FL 33139
T 305 538 5980