Ian Cheng — Emissaries live-simulation trilogy

2015

Artists: Ian Cheng · Year: 2015 · Medium: Live real-time simulation — infinitely-running interactive video environments · Substrate: Unity game engine; custom AI agents; infinite runtime with no fixed duration or ending · Place: New York, USA · Institution: MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Pilar Corrias — trilogy exhibition venues Ian Cheng's Emissaries (2015–17) is a trilogy of "live simulations" — rendered in real time on dedicated GPUs, each running continuously for the full duration of an exhibition, each never showing the same sequence twice. Emissary in the Squat of Gods (2015) follows an ancient tribe encountering a smoldering volcanic landscape. Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015–16) depicts a post-human landscape in which an AI-controlled Shiba Inu attempts to learn what it means to have died. Emissary Sunsets the Self (2017) follows an intelligence attempting to reorganize its own internal architecture. Each simulation runs on a game engine (Unity) but plays nothing like a game: there is no player, no goal, no interface. The simulation simply runs. Cheng came to the practice from film and performance. He had worked in the 2000s at Industrial Light & Magic, had studied with Dan Graham at Columbia, and had developed his early gallery work as scripted animated videos. The move to live simulation was conceptually rigorous: if the medium is a real-time-rendered computational world, then the work should actually be real-time-rendered and computational, and what the viewer sees should be what is happening right now — not a pre-rendered loop. The trilogy's three hour-long exhibition durations produced, collectively, thousands of hours of never-repeated footage that was never recorded because the works refused archival storage. The work is what the gallery is showing, at the moment the viewer is present. This archive cares about the trilogy for two reasons. First, it is the clearest contemporary statement of the live-simulation-as-sculpture argument that David Em's JPL work (1977) and Scott Draves's Bomb (1990) both prefigure. Second, it articulates with unusual clarity the relationship between AI-driven simulation and narrative. The "emissaries" of the title are autonomous agents whose behavior — governed by behavior-tree AI that Cheng specified with the programmer Daniel Temkin — produces emergent narrative that the viewer may or may not witness during the time they stand watching. Cheng has extended the practice through the Bag of Beliefs (BOB) project, a long-running simulated AI creature that has been iteratively trained through gallery installation and online feedback since 2018. He is represented by Gladstone Gallery. Lore Cheng built the first Emissary at his studio in Brooklyn on a consumer-grade PC running Unity; the simulations' computational requirements meant that each gallery installation required a dedicated high-end GPU and an air-conditioned enclosure to keep it running stably over the months of an exhibition. Cheng worked closely with Daniel Temkin — the programmer who had also worked on Cheng's earlier video loops — to design the behavior-tree AI that drives each Emissary. The trilogy's Shiba Inu in the second piece was modeled on Cheng's own dog. The gallery practice of maintaining a running simulation for months required new forms of technical support: MoMA PS1 and the Serpentine Galleries both developed "live-simulation technical staff" roles specifically to support Cheng's shows, and these roles have since become more common as other artists work in the same mode. Sources • Cheng, Ian — Emissaries Guide to Worlding (Serpentine Galleries, 2018). • MoMA PS1 — Ian Cheng: Emissaries (exh. cat. 2017). • Cheng, Ian — iancheng.com (artist archive).