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AI’s impact on existential questions of the self and our future interaction with nonhuman
entities. Few, though, have taken the technologies and innovations of AI as the
underlying materials of their work and sculpted them to their own vision. An exception
is the artist Ian Cheng, who has gone as far as to construct entire worlds of artificial
beings with varying degrees of sentience and intelligence. He refers to these worlds as
Live Simulations. His Emissaries trilogy (2015-2017) is set in a fictional postapocalyptic
world of flora and fauna, in which AI-driven animals and creatures explore the landscape
and interact with each other. Cheng uses advanced graphics but has them programmed
with a lot of glitches and imperfections, which imparts a futuristic and anachronistic
atmosphere at the same time. Through his trilogy, which charts a history of
consciousness, he asks the question “What is a simulation?”

While the majority of artistic works that utilize recent developments in AI
specifically draw from the field of machine learning, Cheng’s Live Simulations take a
separate route. The protagonists and plot lines that are interlaced in each episodic
simulation of Emissaries use the complex logic systems and rules of AI. What is
profound about his continually evolving scenes is that complexity arises not through the
desire/actions of any single actor or artificial godhead but instead through their
constellation, collision, and constant evolution in symbiosis with one another. This gives
rise to unexpected outcomes and unending, unknowable situations—you can never
experience the exact same moment in successive viewings of his work.

Cheng had a discussion at the Serpentine Marathon “GUEST, GHOST, HOST:
MACHINE!” with the programmer Richard Evans, who recently designed Versu, an AI-
based platform for interactive storytelling games. Evans’ work emphasizes the social
interaction of the games’ characters, who react in a spectrum of possible behaviors to the
choices made by the human players. In their conversation, Evans said that a starting
point for the project was that most earlier simulation video games, such as The Sims, did
not sufficiently take into account the importance of social practices. Simulated
protagonists in games would often act in ways that did not correspond well with real
human behavior. Knowledge of social practices limits the possibilities of action but is
necessary to understand the meaning of our actions—which is what interests Cheng for
his own simulations. The more parameters of actions in certain circumstances are
determined in a computer simulation, the more interesting it is for Cheng to experiment
with individual and specific changes. He told Evans, “I gather that if we had AI with
more ability to respond to social contexts, tweaking one thing, you would get something
quite artistic and beautiful.”

Cheng also sees the work of programmers and AI simulations as creating new and
sophisticated tools for experimenting with the parameters of our daily social practices. In
this way, the involvement of artists in AI will lead to new kinds of open experiments in
Art. Such possibilities are—like increased AI capabilities in general—still in the future.
Recognizing that this is an experimental technology in its infancy, very far from
apocalyptic visions of a superintelligent AI takeover, Cheng fills his simulations with
prosaic avatars such as strange microbial globules, dogs, and the undead.

Discussions like these, between artists and engineers, of course are not totally
new. In the 1960s, the engineer Billy Klüver brought artists together with engineers in a
series of events, and in 1967 he founded the Experiments in Art and Technology program
with Robert Rauschenberg and others. In London, at around the same time, Barbara

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