Ian Cheng // Steiner Lecture in Creative Inquiry, 3/30/2022

This is the online zoom documentation of a lecture Ian Cheng gave at Carnegie Mellon’s Critical Theory in Art IV class through the Steiner Lecture series from The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry on March 30th, 2022. Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His simulations, commonly understood as “virtual ecosystems“ are “less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence.“ His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Migros Museum, and other institutions. Since 2012, he has created a series of simulations that explore an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative age