Ian Cheng
Emissary Forks At Perfection 2015-16
Live simulation and story (colour, sound). Infinite duration
”A video game that plays itself,” as Cheng describes it, this digital simulation is generated in real time with no fixed beginning or end. Created using the Unity engine, a popular software tool for developing 3-D video games and AI models, the animation takes place far in the future. It tells the story of Talus Twenty Nine, an artificial intelligence that oversees a lush terrain in which new plants and animals constantly evolve in a Darwinian setting. The AI resurrects an ancient cadaver from the twenty-first century, and summons a pet dog to guide the undead through his posthuman world. Every time the program is run, a new scenario unfolds. The result is an endlessly changing, fantastical model of biological evolution and machine learning in the absence of human life. [source: MoMA]
Emissaries is a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution, past and future, and the ecological conditions that shape it. It is composed of three interconnected episodes, each centered on the life of an emissary who is caught between unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones. [source: Ian Cheng]
Emissary in the Squat of Gods
Emissary Forks At Perfection
Emissary Sunsets The Self
MoMA
April 4th, 2019
The Humble Fabulist 