Ian Cheng

Ian Cheng (born 1984 in Los Angeles) studied cognitive science at UC Berkeley and worked at Industrial Light & Magic before taking an MFA at Columbia — a résumé that explains an art practice built from game engines and agent AI rather than paint. Since the mid-2010s he has pioneered what he calls “live simulation”: virtual ecosystems that run in real time, forever, with no two viewings alike. His Emissaries trilogy (2015–2017) earned a solo presentation at MoMA PS1, and his work is held by MoMA, the Whitney, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation.

An artwork with a nervous system

BOB (Bag of Beliefs), which premiered at London’s Serpentine Galleries in 2018 and traveled to the 2019 Venice Biennale, is Cheng’s most explicit statement on machine minds: a serpentine AI creature whose personality, appetites, and beliefs evolve across the course of an exhibition, shaped by visitor interactions through an app. Cheng describes it as “art with a nervous system” — the viewer is not the audience for BOB so much as weather in its world.

Cheng followed BOB with Life After BOB: The Chalice Study (2021), an anime-styled meditation on a childhood shared with an AI companion, premiered at LUMA Arles. Unlike many peers, he is unambivalent about the generative wave: he told Highsnobiety he loves seeing creative tools spread, arguing that wider access simply means better art. Critics have occasionally found his simulations chilly or hermetic, but few dispute that he saw the artistic implications of autonomous AI agents years before the rest of the art world.