Ian Cheng - Emissary Forks at Perfection
Crédit photo : © Louis Vuitton/Christian Kain ; Courtesy of the artist
- Place
-
Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia
-
Calle del Ridotto, 1353 30124
-
Venise – Italie
- Phone
-
Tél. +39 041 8844318
For its third exhibition produced in the framework the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program, the Espace Louis Vuitton Venezia is pleased to present American artist Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks At Perfection. The Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Hors-les-murs” program showcases previously unseen holdings of the Collection at the Espaces Louis Vuitton Tokyo, München, Venezia and Beijing, thus carrying out the Fondation’s intent to realize international projects and make them accessible to a broader public.
Since the 2010s, Cheng has been developing a unique artistic body of work involving self-generating digital simulations in the form of large, immersive, audio-visual projections. His works, a blend of cognitive sciences, computer programming and video-game aesthetics, explore the potential of new technologies with sensitivity and acuity.
Cheng develops ecosystems, virtual biotopes populated by animated, mutant creatures. As entomologist-demiurge, he breathes artificial and autonomous life into his worlds, then watches them evolve. As in nature, these microcosms are composed of elements of individual logic that meet, collide and mingle in evident, but organic, chaos.
Crédit photo : © Louis Vuitton/Christian Kain
These beings take animal, vegetable or mineral form and are programmed with an array of predetermined properties, behaviours and intentions. They then freely move about in the complex universe created by the artist. Escaping the power of their inventor, their trajectories and encounters – with one another and their environment – are random, allowing for infinite potentialities.
Cheng’s self-evolving and dynamic work-worlds are not temporally bound: they unfold live across an unlimited time period. Automated camera movements focus on the areas of greatest activity, arbitrarily guiding the observer from one place to the next in the simulation. Each activation is unique, generating new narratives and spontaneous developments that cannot be anticipated.
The video installation Emissary Forks at Perfection (2015-2016) is the second chapter of the Emissaries trilogy created by Cheng between 2015 and 2017. These three episodes, located in the same space but addressing different eras, trace the evolution of ensembles of beings and the way they adapt to their environment. Each features an “emissary”, a “narrative agent”, whose actions will modify the course of events. With Emissary Forks at Perfection, Cheng leads us to question the human mind’s adaptive capacities and human evolution in the face of otherness, randomness and the unpredictability of an ever-changing world.
THE ARTIST
Ian Cheng
Since 2010, Ian Cheng has been developing a practice of digital simulations in the form of large-scale immersive projections. His work explores opportunities offered by new technologies and the way they influence consciousness and conditions of evolution.
Cheng studied at Van Nuys High School, then graduated from Berkeley, University of California in 2006, with a dual degree in cognitive science and art practice. After working at Industrial Light & Magic, George Lucas’ company, he pursued his studies at Columbia University, earning an MFA in 2009. From 2010 to 2012 he worked with the artist Pierre Huyghe. Blending cognitive science with a video game-type aesthetic, the artist designs virtual “ecosystems” filled with biological and mineral “lives”. Creatures programmed with predetermined characteristics exist in “live simulations”, escaping their maker for an unlimited lifespan. In London in 2013, Cheng presented the Entropy Wrangler Cloud, one of his first works based on virtual reality using the first generation of Oculus Rift headsets. In 2016, he developed an iOS app named Bad Corgi, which some commentators have described as being like “contemplating chaos.” Between 2015 and 2017 Cheng created the Emissary trilogy, which explores “the history of cognitive evolution, past and future.” It features narrative agents who create the story in real time – an analogy of the theory of consciousness described by Julian Jaynes in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. According to Jaynes, whose theories Cheng adopts in his own manner, pre-conscious humans would have heard “voices” that would take the place of their own consciousness.
