AI, video game engines become philosophical tools for Ian Cheng

A still from Ian Cheng's "Emissary in the Squat of Gods" (2015) / Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Pilar Corrias, London, and Standard (Oslo), Oslo

By Park Han-sol

Artificial intelligence (AI) and video game engines meet philosophy in the art of Ian Cheng.

While armed with a pop-culture-inspired visual language from the likes of video game "SimCity," Cheng's live simulations of virtual ecosystems teeming with AI-based characters and wildlife also make a complex theoretical inquiry into the nature of human consciousness.

The Leeum Museum of Art exhibition, "Ian Cheng: Worlding" ― Asia's first comprehensive survey of the artist's simulated worlds created over the past seven years ― serves as a fascinating portal into such innovation, which merges cutting-edge technology with cognitive psychology to visualize in real time certain mechanisms fueling the human mind and behavior.

Artist Ian Cheng / Courtesy of the Leeum Museum of Art

"I've always been a big fan of art that feels and is alive," the artist said at the recent press conference held at the museum.

While having a deep appreciation for creators like Pierre Huyghe, who incorporates living organisms into his work, Cheng wanted to find a way to make his own work come to life ― without incorporating actual life forms.

He found an answer in what he calls "a video game that plays itself" ― one built upon the interactions among AI entities and their surrounding environments, and that can therefore simulate aliveness.

"The reason why aliveness is so important to me is, I think, when you have a living creature or an ecosystem, there's a certain unpredictability to it, even at the most boring moments. And I feel the complexity that emerges from that will constantly keep your interest as a viewer."

Cheng uses the term, "Worlding," to describe the art of creating this virtual ecosystem that mimics aliveness. It is achieved through "inviting enough chaos for surprising relationships to emerge around it, programming its sense of autonomy and ceding control before your own human finitude gets in the way of its flourishing," he writes in a statement.

The element of unpredictability and spontaneity that dictates all of his open-ended worlds means that any interaction or event taking place among AI characters before the eyes of the audience at a certain time can never be repeated in the exact same way again.

A still from Ian Cheng's "Emissary Forks At Perfection" (2015-2016) / Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery, Pilar Corrias, London, and Standard (Oslo), Oslo

Such is the case for Cheng's iconic "Emissary" trilogy that launched the artist to global acclaim.

The series consists of three interconnected live simulations based on his imagination of human's cognitive evolution. The first begins with an ancient community living in constant threat of a volcanic eruption in the era of "pre-consciousness."

While the rest of the pre-conscious people live simply by following invisible gods' commands delivered through a shaman, a 10-year-old girl awakens one day after experiencing the first flicker of consciousness. Now, she has a mission to lead her people to safety, away from the threat of extinction.

The following episodes take place in the distant future in an unrecognizable world managed by an AI entity, where humans no longer exist. The characters in these simulations all continue to interact, intervene in each other's activities and reconstruct the surrounding information to continue the narrative, however dynamic or tedious it may seem to an outside viewer beyond the screen.

Each episode has its own "emissary," a key character that has the power to advance the story noticeably ― the first ancient human to experience consciousness with a mission to evacuate her fellow villagers, for example.

Because these simulations are ultimately "a video game that plays itself," emissaries can either succeed or fail in their given mission, depending on their relations with other AI models and the environment formed throughout that particular world. Once that world comes to an end, the episode starts over, but with an entirely new path of interactions among the characters, which once again, are ready to unfold. It's a never-ending but ever-changing loop that is unpredictable and therefore, alive.

A still from Ian Cheng's "BOB (Bag of Beliefs)" (2018-2019) / Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Pilar Corrias, London

Cheng further explores the inner workings of human consciousness through AI and video game technology in "BOB (Bag of Beliefs)." BOB is a serpent-like, artificial lifeform made up of multiple "demon" heads all with different motivations and beliefs that compete for the control of a single body ― an idea inspired by psychoanalyst Carl Jung's theory of sub-personalities in humans.

"I split up the brain of BOB into multiple sub-personalities. I call them 'demons' that each had a motivational aim. There's a hunger demon, a sleep demon, an explorer demon, etc.," the artist said.

"You can see a complex and animal-like behavior in BOB that I couldn't have achieved or even thought of in approaching consciousness or the brain in another manner."

Audience can also influence BOB's behaviors by giving it an additional personality trait or belief through an interactive mobile app, "BOB Shrine."

A still from Ian Cheng's "Life After BOB: The Chalice Study" (2021) / Courtesy of the artist, Gladstone Gallery and Pilar Corrias, London

The latest piece featured in the exhibition, "Life After BOB: The Chalice Study," an animation co-commissioned by Leeum and three other art institutions, puts BOB, the AI, into the context of its interaction with humans.

It is based on a story of a 10-year-old girl named Chalice, whose father implanted BOB in her nervous system to let it guide her to make the "best possible" life choices. But if the AI makes all the most ideal decisions for her, what is there left for her to do?

One of the ideas that propelled his latest work was psychiatrist Eric Berne's theory of life script, where a child's "life script" is influenced by parental figures and becomes reinforced or rewritten in the process of growing up.

When Cheng was writing the story for "Life After BOB," he was greeted with the birth of his daughter. Now as a father himself, the line that hit him especially hard was "Parenting is programming."

"As you get older, you have to [start] examin[ing] the programming that your parents have unconsciously and consciously given you and decide what to keep and what to unchain," he said. "That's the story I tried to tell my child, which is a story we all know, but renewed with things like AI and these near-future concerns."

"Ian Cheng: Worlding" runs through July 3 at the Leeum Museum of Art.