Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His simulations, commonly understood as "virtual ecosystems" are less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, :it:Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo|Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, :de:Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst|Migros Museum, and other institutions.
Cheng popularized the use of simulation as a medium available to artistic practice, capable of composing together both man-made and algorithmically generated content that together produce emergent behavior over an infinite duration. Cheng's work highlights the capacity of simulation to express the unpredictable dynamic between order and chaos in a complex system. Cheng coined the term “live simulation” as a subset of simulation that is presented in public in real-time without regard for an optimal outcome or pre-defined fitness criteria. Since 2013, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an AI-based agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. From 2015 to 2017, Cheng developed Emissaries, a trilogy of episodic live simulations that “explore the history of cognitive evolution, past and future.” Unlike previous simulations, Emissaries introduced a narrative agent, the emissary, whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Cheng describes the archetype of the emissary as one who "is caught between unravelling old realities and emerging weird one," an embodied way to explore the relationship between meaning and meaninglessness. Cheng drew inspiration from the narrative nature of consciousness described by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. At Serpentine Galleries in 2018, Cheng premiered BOB, an AI-based creature whose personality, body, and life script evolve across exhibitions in what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” BOB premiered in the United States in 2019 at Gladstone Gallery. BOB features a unique model of AI that combines an inductive engine for the learning of rule-based beliefs from sensory experiences with a motivational framework composed of mini-personalities called "demons". Each demon competes for control of BOB's body in a "congress of demons", and each utilizes the inductive engine to achieve its motivations while minimizing surprise. Viewers were invited to send their own stream of stimuli to BOB through BOB Shrine, an iOS app.
Other activities
Cheng directed the music video Brats, by Liars. At Frieze London in 2013, Cheng premiered Entropy Wrangler Cloud, one of the first artworks made for virtual reality, using first generation Oculus Rift headsets. Cheng developed Bad Corgi, an iOS app commissioned by Serpentine Galleries, which has been called a "shadowy mindfulness app for contemplating chaos."
Ian Cheng, curated by Filipa Ramos, Triennale Di Milano, Milan, 2014
Collections
Cheng's work is collected by institutions including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Migros Museum, Zurich; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; Yuz Museum, Shanghai.
