new art, flag art, good art, portal art
Ian Cheng’s work explores the nature of mutation and the capacity of humans to relate to change. Drawing on principles of video game design, improvisation, and cognitive science, Cheng has developed “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. What results is a cascade of emergent behaviors that the artist can manage but never truly control. Cheng describes his simulations as akin to a “neurological gym”: a format for viewers to deliberately exercise feelings of confusion, anxiety, and cognitive dissonance that accompany the experience of unrelenting change. Through simulations, Cheng wonders if it’s possible to love these difficult feelings and refactor our relationship to indeterminacy as a feature of being alive today, not a bug.
About Ian Cheng
Ian Cheng (b.1984 Los Angeles, USA) lives and works in New York. Current and recent solo exhibitions include: EMISSARY FORKS featuring THOUSAND ISLANDS, Espace Louis Vuitton München (2017); EMISSARIES, MoMA PS1, New York (2017); Forking at Perfection, Migros Museum, Zurich (2016); Emissary Forks At Perfection, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2015); Emissary in the Squat of Gods, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2015); Real Humans, with Wu Tsang, Jordan Wolfson, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf (2015); Ian Cheng, La Triennale di Milano, Milan (2014); Baby feat. Bali, Standard (Oslo), Oslo (2013).
Recent group exhibitions include: Yokohama Triennale 2017, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama (2017); Suspended Animation: Headlong into digital space, Les Abattoirs, Musée FRAC Occitanie, Toulouse (2017); Generation Loss: 10 Years Julia Stoschek Collection, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2017); Shanghai Project Chapter 2 Exhibition: Seeds of Time, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, Shanghai (2017); BMW Tate Live Exhibition: Ten Days Six Nights, Tate Modern, London (2017); Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art 1905–2016, Whitney Museum, New York (2016); Take Me (I’m Yours), Jewish Museum, New York (2016); Overpop, Yuz Museum, Shanghai (2016); Liverpool Biennial (2016); WELT AM DRAHT, Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin (2016); Stranger, MOCA, Cleveland (2016); Suspended Animation, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington (2016); Co-Workers, Musee d’Moderne Paris (2015); Taipei Biennial – The Great Acceleration, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei (2014); Phantom Limbs, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London (2014).
About the Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium
Berkeley’s Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium is an internationally recognized forum for presenting new ideas that challenge conventional wisdom about art, technology, and culture. This series, free of charge and open to the public, presents artists, writers, curators, and scholars who consider contemporary issues at the intersection of aesthetic expression, emerging technologies, and cultural history, from a critical perspective.
ALL SEATS ARE AVAILABLE ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS
This year, we are excited to present Socially Engaged Internet-Art: Aesthetics of Information Ethics with Paolo Cirio as part of the following series:
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
2017
09/25 World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
Frank Foer, Journalist, New York
In partnership with the Graduate School of Journalism
10/23 Socially Engaged Internet-Art: Aesthetics of Information Ethics
Paolo Cirio, Artist, New York
In partnership with the Department of Art Practice
11/6 We must conjure our Gods before we obey them
Michael Rock, Designer, 2X4, New York
In partnership with the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning
2018
01/29 Indexical Ambivalence
Kris Paulsen, Associate Professor, The Ohio State University, Ohio
In partnership with the History and Theory of New Media Lecture Series
02/05 Connectivity as Human Right
Nicholas Negroponte, Architect, MIT, Massachussetts
In partnership with the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
03/19 Yugoexport Is the Name of this Oral Corporation
Irena Haiduk, Artist, Belgrade, Serbia
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series
04/09 new art, flag art, good art, portal art
Ian Cheng, Artist, Los Angeles
In partnership with the Wiesenfeld Visiting Artist Lecture Series
04/16 Abolition Feminisms
Angela Davis, activist & scholar, UC Santa Cruz
A 2018 Regents Lecture