Inquiries?
mail@iancheng.com
Dear Ian, I emailed you over a month ago and still haven't heard back from you, wtf?
... try office@metissuns.com
I have an urgent exhibition request ...
... try info@gladstonegallery.com and info@pilarcorrias.com
I need a hi-res image of [LAB, BOB, Emissaries] for something ...
Feel free to use any images on this site, just take care to include the caption, and send a link when its out.
Where can I see your work in person?
See shows
Press bio?
Ian Cheng (born Los Angeles, 1984) is an artist based in New York. He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul; Light Art Space, Berlin; The Shed, New York; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Serpentine Galleries, London; MoMA PS1, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and group presentations at Venice Biennale, Venice; Museum of Modern Art, New York; De Young Museum, San Francisco; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Okayama Art Summit, Okayama; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Sculpture Center, New York.
Since 2012, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. He is the creator of BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI-driven creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” Most recently, Cheng directed Life After BOB, a real-time anime exploring human-AI symbiosis. Cheng is the author of Emissary's Guide To Worlding, a book exploring the psychology and techniques of creating living autonomous worlds. Cheng is the founder of Opponent, a new company building animal-level AI agents for kids and families.What is a World? What is Worlding?
A World is not just a place. It's not just its inhabitants, its network graph, its laws, its A plot, its subplots. It's all those things.
A World is a super-organism that you can believe in.
What is Worlding? A frame for the new art of creating things that develop a life of their own and outgrow their original author.
Read more...
More...
A World is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game.
To create a World, you have to first pick the damn game. Playing a sport. Surviving school. Chasing likes. Selling a thing. Interviewing enemies. Growing a relationship. Writing a series of stories. Trying and trying an unsolvable problem. Wrestling with God. The game itself is nothing new.
What’s new, now, is that worlding no longer requires the precondition of massive resources, geographic coherence, multigenerational history, the permission of incumbent elites, or even fully human inhabitants. The ease of Worlding makes it possible to express an unprecedented long tail variety of Worlds. A World can be intimate and niche by design, inhabited by both human and artificial agents, nested within larger networks, started by anyone with a spark of imagination and nerve. A World can bloom in the dark and swallow other Worlds over night.
Worlding, then, is the art of creating and parenting a web of relations - by picking a repeatable game, inviting enough chaos for surprising relationships to emerge around it, programming its engine of autonomy, and ceding control before your own human finitude gets in the way of its flourishing.
Some Worlds will die in a day. Some will grow to outlive you. A culture of Worlding is life lived fluidly among wise ancient Worlds, functional institutional Worlds, and new experiments in Worlding. A plurality of Worlds that nourishes you across ages.
Live to World. World to live. Read more...What is a story? What is a storyworld?
A story is a map. Specfically, a map of changing behavior over time. A good story argues why a particular behavior works over other formidable competing behaviors in resolving a conflict. A story's telling is made pleasurable in its specificity, by the implied territory peeking through the map. That implied territory is called a storyworld. When an author wishes to tell multiple coherent stories, the author also inevitably builds out more and more of the storyworld. A matured storyworld makes developing further stories and their pleasurable specificity increasingly easy, every detail pregnant with a network of meaning, but at the cost of increasing predictability. It can also tempt an author to prioritize maintaining the inhabitability of the storyworld at the expense of airing stories that do the job of mapping new behavior that is relevant to the lives of its audience. Therefore the requirement for a storyworld to stay ALIVE is to incorporate unexpected chaos inspired by the mother of all territories, reality itself, as frequently as possible. For storyworlds that are overly complete and orderly, this revitalization can be accomplished with a hard reboot. For storyworlds that deal with chaos as a specific feature of itself, this revitalization can be accomplished with a revelation that there is some hidden unseen level of the territory to be dealt with. In future storyworlds, simulation and AI-driven characters may furnish ongoing self-generated chaos from which to endlessly map new vital stories.
What is a simulation?
Think of a simulation as a videogame that plays itself. If Reality is the mother of all territories - full of endless ongoing surprises, swells of chaos, pockets of order, emergent behavior, and never ending - then a simulation is an artificial territory. Humble compared to Reality, but nonetheless capable of self-generating surprises.
From Live Simulations, 2015: "It is a private game we devise when the aliveness of a situation is too complex to really know. It is drafting reality through an ocean of forking behaviors to find an optimal end. What is a live simulation? It is playing this game in public and not letting it end when the game gets good. Darwin said the greatest live simulation is nature herself, who incessantly tries and fails aloud, never stopping at perfection. But nature is often too fast, too slow, too big, too small, for us. We desire a live simulation at scale with human spacetime, but unending in its variety and blind to our barometers of quality. A live simulation that we can feel, but does not give a fig for us."What is AI? What is artificial life?
First, intelligence can be defined as the ability to make models. More precisely, it's an agent's ability to make models from its sensorial perception stream of reality, and then continuously unify those models to be predictive across contexts and time scales. If this ability can be replicated in non-biological systems - I think it can - then we will have achieved the engineering of intelligence.
Artificial life can then be derived from assigning an AI system to be instrumental to a set of competing motivations. When the coupling of intelligence and motivations can produce action that align multiple motivations, then artificial life will be realized.Your books?
Emissary's Guide To Worlding, Metis Suns, 2019 (ebook version 1.0 about Worlding) iBooks Kindle
Emissaries Guide To Worlding, Serpentine Galleries + Koenig Books, 2018 (catalog for Emissaries trilogy, prototype for worlding)
Forking At Perfection, JRP Ringier @ Migros Museum, 2016
Ian Cheng Live Simulations @ Spector Books, 2015
This Papaya Tastes Perfect, 2012 @ Badlands Unlimited