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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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