Ian Cheng - Emissary forks featuring thousand island
Crédit photo : © Louis Vuitton/Christian Kain
This exhibition commemorates Cheng’s progressive practice in new digital art and honours his receipt of the 2017 “Award for the Filmic Oeuvre“, presented by Louis Vuitton in association with KINO DER KUNST. Conceived and produced under the artistic direction of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, the exhibition showcases key works by Cheng in the framework of the Fondation’s “Hors-les-Murs“ program, destined to introduce previously unseen artworks from its permanent collection to audiences of the Espaces Culturels Louis Vuitton München, Venezia, Beijing, and Tokyo, thus realizing its mission to curate ambitious international art projects and share its collection with a broader public.
Cheng is an artist dissolving the boundaries between art and artificial intelligence. Drawing on the principles of video game design, cognitive science and improvisation, he develops “live simulations“, living virtual ecosystems that begin with basic programmed properties, but are left to self-evolve without authorial intent or end. His simulations model the dynamics of often imaginative organisms and objects, but do so with the unforgiving causality found in nature itself. The artist describes his simulations as a form of “neurological gym“: a format to exercise the feelings of confusion, anxiety and cognitive dissonance that accompany the perpetual state of change, a defining characteristic of our times.
