Happy Nice Mall

Ian Cheng was feeling adrift. It was the beginning of 2013; He was about 30 years old, with an arts degree from Berkeley and an arts degree from Columbia, but he needed an idea, something to build a career on. Contemplating that question one winter afternoon in the balcony cafe of Whole Foods Market on Houston Street, in a place that promised people-watching and “your time”, he found himself staring absently at the shoppers below.

He became more and more enchanted. The market was its own little ecosystem, with strict rules, but elements of luck were also thrown in. Someone’s dog that doesn’t behave. A man sneaking food from a salad bar. People double to get a plate. An idea began to form in Cheng’s mind, based on cognitive science from his other major in Berkeley. His thoughts ran into complex systems. Emergency behavior. What if a video game engine could do it…

Eight years later today, Cheng is an internationally recognized artist who uses artificial intelligence and video game technology to explore themes such as the nature of human consciousness and a future where we co-exist with intelligent machines.

This future is exactly what his latest work is about, a 48-minute “narrative animation” – please don’t call it a movie – currently in theaters. Luma Arles, new art park in the south of France. It is on display at the Shed in New York on September 10. Somewhat cryptically titled “Life After BOB: The Goblet Study,” it’s a commentary on AI’s potential to ruin your life.

Cheng followers will recognize BOB from previous exhibitions at the Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea and the Serpentine Galleries in London. This BOB was a virtual creature, an artificial intelligence whose name means “Bag of Faith” – perhaps a fine dig at early AI researchers who thought they could program a computer with everything it needed to know. Chalice and her father, Dr. Chalice, who invented the BOB and placed it in her nervous system at birth to guide her as she grows. It is the story of a 10-year-old girl named Wong.

Like Cheng’s other work, “Life After BOB” is intelligent, tech-driven, and teaches us about cognitive psychology, neuroscience, machine learning, and AI — like deep learning and artificial neural networks, Siri and Alexa, and facial recognition software. “One of the most radical artists working with digital technology today,” said Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine’s artistic director. “It’s not like an add-on — technology is in the DNA of the business,” said Alex Poots, Shed’s artistic director.

Cheng himself is a quiet, busy 37-year-old who grew up in Los Angeles and is the only child of Hong Kong immigrants working in graphic design. He and his wife, artist Rachel Rosewere expecting their first child when they started developing “Life After BOB” a few years ago. When we met for coffee near his penthouse on the Lower East Side, he explained that the anxiety this created was very significant.

“I just thought, what could I possibly do that would make me the worst dad possible?” She decided the answer would be to combine her work with her parenting. “And that is Dr. Wong’s main mistake,” Cheng said. “She feels that giving her a BOB at birth will help her reach a life that is not only successful but fulfilling and meaningful.” That’s why Dr. Wong conducts the Chalice study, an AI experiment, with his daughter as a guinea pig. Ultimately (spoiler alert), Chalice has to decide whether or not to take control of her life.

There’s a direct line from Cheng’s Whole Foods epiphany to “Life After BOB,” which begins with a series of work using Unity that includes some variations of the “Entropy Wrangler” title. video game development. Unity allowed him to simulate the kind of behavior he saw emerging at Whole Foods – but instead of people walking around a market, he could now assemble potted plants, cinder blocks, a disembodied hand, a broken office. The chair and various other things are in a constant, endless, frenzied motion, never stopping, never returning. “Entropy Wrangler” was a real-time animation where the same thing never happened twice.

Later, Cheng incorporated characters into his animations and gave them a goal. The first in this series, “Emissary in the Squat of Gods,” centers around a young girl living in a primitive community at the foot of a long-dormant volcano. He understands that the volcano may be about to erupt, but will the villagers heed? (Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.)

Cheng might have been preoccupied with such questions as a cognitive scientist, but he had no interest in an academic career. “I think of art as a space of permission,” he said. “The only region in culture where you can explore the present and cannibalize the past with relatively little oversight.” This put him in a much more special group: “He’s now one of the greatest artists of his generation, doing work like no other,” said video and performance artist Paul Chan, who had previously hired him as an assistant.

With the “Entropy Wrangler” and “Emissary” series, Cheng has created works of art that can do the unexpected in response to the interactions it sets in motion—having what cognitive scientists call emergent qualities. His next work, “BOB,” was thus not only unpredictable, but possibly sensitive: a semi-intelligent computer program that took physical form as an enormous, red, ever-changing, snake-like creature behind a glass wall. There were not just one, but several BOBs, and visitors had very different experiences when they debuted on the Serpentine in 2018.

Some found a certain BOB attractive and handsome. Ignores or forgets other people. “The gallery was a kind of animal sanctuary,” Obrist recalled. “BOBs were alive and growing around the clock.” And then, “About a week before the BOB show, we got a call in the middle of the night.” The creatures were supposed to sleep with the galleries closed, but one got up at 3am. Code fixed; never happened again. But still.

“Life After BOB,” which will be screened at a show at the Shed next month hosted by chief curator Emma Enderby, is traditional in comparison. It has human-type characters, an AI character that’s just a cartoon, and a beginning, middle, and ending. It also draws on Cheng’s recent interest in what he calls “worldism.” People in the entertainment industry call it world-building – creating elaborate settings for open-ended stories that fans can immerse themselves in. Marvel Cinematic Universe. “Western world.”

Unlike his earlier works, “Life After BOB” does not exhibit immediate behavior. The animation is live, the game engine recreates it for each view. However, it follows the same script, unless Cheng rewrites it (which he does often). The innovation comes when visitors, after watching, can turn to another screen behind them and explore the world of Chalice with their smartphone. They can do most of the things you can do with a TV remote – pause, rewind, review scenes – but because the animation is rendered in real time rather than playing like a video, you can click on an object, change it. Camera angles and zoom in to explore in detail.

This was inspired by the reaction Cheng got when he read Eric Carle’s classic children’s picture book “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” to his now 2-year-old daughter Eden. Business. “He knows the story in and out,” he said. “And now when she looks at him, she goes up to the caterpillar on the tree and says, ‘Daddy, Eden come in! Eden come in!’ “It wants to get into the tree. The caterpillar eats a small hole in the apple and wants to get inside the apple. It’s like it wants to immerse itself in the details of the world because it’s already metabolized the story.”

These shopping with his daughter brought back a lot of memories. “This is how I felt as a kid and watched ‘Alien’ or ‘Blade Runner’. Oh my God – you want to live in that world because there’s so much in there.” As if you watched the movie in two dimensions, x and y, he continued, “and now you want to get into the z-axis – you want to jump into the movie. And he voiced it for me. ”

Of course, this is not possible with the book. The best Cheng can do is touch the apple in the book and then touch her daughter’s forehead. Even makes him laugh with delight. “But I thought, wow, what if I could give this to my daughter? Because his imagination is there” – if only technology were like that.

Frank Rose is the author of “The Sea We Swim In: How Stories Work in a Data-Driven World.”