BOB at Serpentine Galleries

Ian Cheng is an American artist born in 1984, having graduating from University of California, Berkeley with a dual degree in cognitive science and art practice.

He is known for his live simulation that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. These ‘simulations’ are also known to be ‘virtual ecosystems’. The work has less of a focus on the technological aspect and instead, focuses on the how the work can self-evolve and adapt, just like an ecosystem would if any changes are applied to it. The simulation will change and adapt and progress as different factors interact with the work. “It is a format to deliberately exercise the feelings of confusion, anxiety, and cognitive dissonance that accompany the experience of unrelenting change. I wonder if it is possible to love these difficult feelings, because when you love something and there is an abundance of it, you can begin to play and compose with it.“

Cheng’s work highlights the capacity of simulation to express the unpredictable dynamic between order and chaos in a complex system.

Ian Cheng’s work explores the nature of mutation and the capacity of humans to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation, and cognitive science, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-evolving 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.

Most recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” He exhibited BOB at the Serpentine Gallery in 2018, a sentient artwork that was continuously growing and evolving at all times, with every interaction. A grid of monitors shows a limbo space within which an animation of a bright red, spiky serpentine creature slithers about. That’s the titular “BOB.” Depending on when you see the show, BOB will be longer or shorter, and have a greater or fewer number of heads, which branch, hydra-like, from its body, as it evolves in relation to different stimuli.

BOB advances Cheng’s use of simulation to focus on an individual agent’s capacity to deal with surprise: the subjective difference between expectations and perception. Over the course of its lifetime, BOB’s body, mind, and personality evolve to better confront the continuous stream of life’s surprises, and metabolize them into familiar routines. Crucially, BOB incorporates the tutoring influence of the viewer to help offset BOB’s temptation to only satisfy its immediate impulses and childhood biases. As BOB dies many deaths – whether through failures of personality, bad parenting, random accident, or a life well lived – BOB may become synonymous with a reoccurring pattern of behavior, common across all BOB lifetimes, thereby manifesting the undying eternal characteristic of a god.

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