New York-based artist Ian Cheng has been creating live simulations since 2012. He explores the human mind and “an agent’s ability to deal with an ever-changing environment” by combining AI, video game technologies, and cognitive science. His recent work, Life after BOB: The Chalice Study, reflects on the possible scenarios of our future in an age of rapid technological innovation. What will it look like when we coexist with intelligent machines?

The project is currently touring worldwide, co-commissioned by LAS Berlin (Germany, Berlin), The Shed (USA, New York), and Luma Arles (France, Arles). In autumn, LAS will present it at Halle am Berghain in Berlin.

The centre of the exhibition is a narrative animation about a ten-year-old girl named Chalice. When she was a little child, her father, Dr Wong, implanted an AI assistant, BOB, into her nervous system. BOB was supposed to help Chalice live a meaningful and happy life, coping with the chaos of the world around her, but everything went amiss. While the AI coach was successfully doing its job, the girl grew more irrelevant. As Dr Wong began to favour the BOB side of Chalice, she started wondering: What is left for her to do as a classic human?

Combining compelling storytelling and simulation is the primary formal challenge of Life After BOB and its future episodes (Life After BOB is a planned eight-part anime miniseries). Speaking about the difficulties he encountered while bridging these techniques, Ian Cheng explains: Simulations are like kids, pets or a park. You set up the initial conditions, help steer its character a bit in its infancy, and then let it go and surprise you. On the other hand, storytelling is very precise and deterministic. When you experience a story, you want to trust that its drama is satisfying and meaningful.

While working on the project, the artist also had to take into account that the film and simulations have different temporality. He notes that combining them in one work is like playing with flickering. A viewer lives in the cinema very intensely, captured by plot twists. But when it comes to simulation, people take it in a relaxed way, their eyes wandering over various details and slow-evolving changes.

Life After BOB was entirely created on the Unity video game engine, so the animation is generated afresh for every viewing. No one has made such a long film using this tech solution before. Conversely, Cheng dreamed of a production environment where rapid iteration was encouraged and updates were the norm.

I wanted to find a way to turn movie-making into software building. I am betting this will be the norm in the metaverse transmedia future.

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