Episode 006: Ian Cheng

Show Notes

On this week's show we chat with artist Ian Cheng, who since 2012 has been building a universe of sentient software, creatures, and elaborate systems of logic in the form of self-playing video games, installations, drawings, and prints. In this extended chat with host Ben Fino-Radin, Ian shares some of his deepest influences, past mentors, childhood, studio practice and rituals for creativity.

Links from the conversation with Ian
> Ian's website: http://iancheng.com
> Life After Bob: https://theshed.org/program/142-ian-cheng-life-after-bob
> Pierre Huyghe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Huyghe
> Paul Chan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Chan_(artist)

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Support artists
Art and Obsolescence is a non-profit podcast, sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and we are committed to equitably supporting artists that come on the show. Help support our work by making a tax deductible gift through NYFA here: https://www.artandobsolescence.com/donate

Transcript

Ben Fino-Radin 0:02

From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence. I'm your host Ben Fino-Radin. Welcome back, everyone. I hope your week is off to a great start. My producer and I are back from our bike tour fully recharged, and so happy to be back here with you this week for another episode. And folks, you better buckle up because this week's conversation with artists Ian Cheng is going to go some wild places…

Ian Cheng 0:32

The interpretive structure that is your your mind and your body that interprets reality stably, man it can be programmed and hacked. And it was worth knowing how far you could program and hack it.

Ben Fino-Radin 0:43

Oh, by the way, if you're new here, where are my manners welcome! On this show, I sit down with artists, collectors, professionals, people like curators, conservators, and all kinds of people that are shaping the past, present and future of art and technology. Before we get started today, I wanted to ask you all a favor. If you are a regular listener of the show, you've noticed by now that there are no commercials, and that's no accident. This podcast is a nonprofit operation. Thanks to the nice folks at the New York Foundation for the Arts, who handle all of the money stuff for this podcast. Operating costs for the show are incredibly low. But I want to ensure that I'm able to support and equitably pay artists that come on the show because well, that's just the right thing to do. Artists can't pay the rent, with exposure. So if equity and supporting artists is important to you, please help me make that happen by heading over to artandobsolescence.com where you can find a donation button. And you know what? Go ahead, do right now. I'll, wait. You're doing it right? Now, if you're not in a place to donate to help us in our work to support artists, I totally get it. But the good news is there are so many ways that you can help that are totally free, you can subscribe if you haven't already, leave a review if you're listening on Apple podcasts, and join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence, tell a friend about the show, all of that helps immensely. Now without further delay, today's guest Ian Cheng has been building worlds and arguably a whole universe within self playing video games or simulations, as well as drawings, prints and other media since around 2012. And you know, I could totally nerd out and tell you about how the software that powers Ian's simulations is sentient, and always evolving and actually requires special levels of care from conservators as though it were a living creature. But really the thing that has always drawn me to Ian's work is that experiencing any piece of his feels as though you are just getting a glimpse into an expansive and deeply rich world where futurism utopia dystopia, cognitive science, and corgis all go to play. But as always, we start from the beginning to find out what was the training that led Ian's neural network to create this rich body of work?

Ian Cheng 3:32

Yeah, so I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, it's a suburb of Los Angeles. It's basically like strip malls and Starbucks and car dealerships. The best image I have is like in Paul Thomas Anderson movies like Magnolia or Punch Drunk Love, or Boogie Nights. That's like my neighborhood in Boogie Nights. That's an area called Chatsworth. My parents were graphic designers. They're retired now, they immigrated from Hong Kong in the mid 70s. And they both applied to go to art center in Pasadena. And so they they went straight into school for graphic design. And that's where they met ever since a very young age. They were very encouraging and exposing me to art and they had tons of art books lying around and my mom came over my mom and dad came over to New York recently. And she said I was drawing like images of a fan. Because we had like a fan that I was obsessed with. I guess when I was two, starting in two years old, I was like mastering trying to draw a circle to mimic this the shape of this fan and I have a daughter who's two years old who just turned two now and I see how she draws and it's kind of like more scribbly way. And so my mom's like yeah, look like I knew you were going to be something like kind of I kind of knew you're going to be an artist of some kind. So I guess I was very interested just intuitively and consciously with drawing when as a, as a young kid, my parents would take me to Malibu sometimes, and there are these tide pools there that I was fascinated with, that's the area of the beach where the waves are kind of protected by other kind of rock or sand formations. And they're these little tide pools where you can see different kinds of sea anemone or like little like shellfish. And often some creatures that you can tell if there were a plant or an animal or just piece of garbage. And so I was always fascinated these micro ecosystems, and certainly that later influenced my work making these simulations. But yeah, it's very, I'd say, I was very alone as a kid, I wasn't, I'm an only child, but I was never really lonely if that makes sense. I mean, I don't know if this is true, I'm gonna find out with my own kids. But I think that I'd like to think that indirectly cultivates this sort of imaginitive childhood in a sense that your imagination is an important thing to like dwell in. So I definitely drew a lot for myself and would wander like empty lots near near my home. And yeah, just do a lot of solitary things that, I think kind of what an artist does now. at my wedding, actually, I was thinking I just had to give a speech. And I wanted to address my parents and my wife's parents. But in regards to my parents, it's so funny because you think of Asian parents is very academically minded, which was definitely true. There's no question about that. But because my parents are graphic designers, I was trying to square that with like, their passion for the arts, I realized, like, well, in China, that's just part of the culture, like their parents loved calligraphy, music and dance. And even the way when you speak Cantonese or Mandarin, there's different tones, you're almost in a way familiar intuitively with singing to just to speak Mandarin, or Cantonese. And so like arts was like, in their ancestry in a way. That's the way I started to like, think about them. Because growing up, I always had this true stereotype that they were very academically minded. They wanted me to just like excel at SATs in school, which they did, but I felt very fortunate that they balanced that with a love for graphic design, movies, and art, and especially with movies. My mom would take me movie hopping on Saturdays, where we, we'd get in there at like, 10am and watch God like six movies a day. This one day in 1999 I remember we saw I think we saw Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Insider, Three Kings, and maybe Waking Life or Princess Mononoke like all in one day. I mean, my mind was blown. performative like that, that that one day of movie hopping was like literally mind blowing. 1999 was super like it was every I felt like every mature Hollywood director was trying to get in their best work before the Millennium happened.

Ben Fino-Radin 7:55

What happened from there? Did you go to a traditional art school for undergrad? What happened next?

Ian Cheng 8:03

So I went to UC Berkeley and I studied cognitive science and I double majored in art but my Yeah, my interest started to shift toward trying to understand how the mind works and how people's behaviors are formed, how personalities form, at the time, cognitive science, I mean, they billed it as this kind of, I don't know, like an Avengers of like, like, like majors where it was like, philosophy of mind neuroscience, computer science, linguistics, all kind of rolled wrapped up and rolled into one one major, so I thought, oh, yeah, that that checks all my marks of interesting things. I would be interested in that at 19, 18 and 19. So weirdly, it was the Dark Age of AI like ideas of neural networks, deep learning that was all theoretical and in textbooks, but no one could prove that out. The there are no graphics cards back then no one had any way of demonstrating that this kind of crazy idea of neural nets can could do anything. So I studied all this stuff with the intent of learning more about AI then of the day, but there's nothing to do with it at the time. Studying Cog Sci was like a hedge to do something, have some realistic pragmatic skills or like something seemingly useful in the Bay Area, even though it kind of wasn't being an artist was definitely not on my mind at that age. I double majored in art and I was always very interested in art I was doing a lot of painting at the time, I took a video class that was very interesting. And then I took a kind of a life changing class in retrospect, it was a class on Maya, which is a 3d, you know, 3d modeling and animation program. I just thought this would be interesting. And I was there was a class taught by an artist called Greg Niemeyer and he had us all learn trial by fire. We had to make short films in 3d when you know, the stuff is pretty primitive. And so yeah, I was able to write and direct and animate like my own short and That definitely opened up a lot of doors toward understanding my own aptitude toward picking up software and trying to combine that artistically with animation and narrative storytelling things that I'm interested in worked literally working on now, with my current project. I can't tell you how many times I think back now and now they have two kids and I make the work that I make how many just random decisions that I made or were made for me, that led me here. I it's it's unfathomable. It's scary to think about.

Ben Fino-Radin 10:33

So after art school, was there a kind of like series of unfortunate day jobs? Or did you just kind of have meteoric rise to art stardom?

Ian Cheng 10:46

No, no. So I had no idea I was gonna… this is 2006. I graduate from Berkeley. And then my first job out of college was an entry level position at Industrial Light magic, which is a visual effects post production studio originated by George Lucas to deal with the visual effects for Star Wars, but then later, you know, they would just bid and contract out VFX work for blockbuster movies. And so I had an entry level job at Industrial Light and Magic, and that was extremely inspiring. You know, having grown up with movies, and being a creature of narrative like to be involved and see how the technical and artistic sides really meet in visual effects was for me, very, very exciting the creation of illusions, especially ILM, were there you know, at that time already, well advanced shift away from physical models and kind of tactile material illusion to of course, digital illusion. You know, they were had their own internal software of everything that we have commercially out here, they have their own internal version of that they've written themselves plus the external stuff. So it's like, kind of mind blowing, what they've created there to be able to make movies and visual effects more realistic, but also continually doing like insane r&d. every movie was like a challenge for them to up their game. And in particular, I remember they were working on the Pirates of the Caribbean, one of the sequels and there's like some climactic scene where it was a giant whirlpool and like Jack Sparrow, and Davy Jones octopus guy were fighting across their ships wild spiraling into his Whirlpool. And they were trying to simulate water particle for water particle, a whirlpool that was at the scale that Gore Verbinski the director wanted, which is an enormous, like storm level scale, Whirlpool. And they're trying to simulate that at scale in order to like, understand, and then, of course, dramatize a whirlpool at that scale, of course, you would never see that in real life. Anyways, like I was so outside of that process, but I knew that they were doing that I could like kind of peek in on some of their dailies. And just seeing the undertaking of such a ridiculous, absurd problem, it was extremely beautiful to see that, that you could like devote yourself to a ridiculous problem making a like a giant absurd Whirlpool, but then trying to simulate that with the fidelity of reality was something that obviously inspired me to develop my own simulations later. But at the time, I had no mind for making art on my own, I was just honestly, it was trying to make a living and trying to figure out who I was. And I was 22. At the time, I didn't know who I was, I was just kind of doing that, you know, finally having some spending money in my own ability to rent my own apartment, because that job was like, good enough for me at the time. Just to put a pin on that I would pause and say also at the time, because it's Berkeley, you know, a lot of… which eventually drove me to things I'm interested in now in art were honestly like the psychedelics that were just available and lying around at the time. So there's a lot of like, mushrooms and LSD experiences there that I think really opened me up internally as a person, primarily because I think I was much more engineer, and how do I say, left brain minded as a person back then, and then it took something like these early psychedelic experiences. It sounds so cheesy to say this, but it's nice to have a vision quest when you're that age to sort of figure out who you are. And in fact, I would almost like argue, if I had to do this, again, you may with my own kids, or think maybe a future of schooling like I think kids at that age and early 20s should have psychedelic experiences just to kind of feel out the edges of what it feels like to turn over every stone in your mind and sort of, you know, for a moment, reduce your ego to nothing and get you out of your own rigid patterns. I think it's almost It was almost a perfect time to do that. For me. It didn't lead to the epiphany. Oh, I gotta be an artist. I got to make exactly this, but did just make me more open as a person.

Ben Fino-Radin 14:44

Yeah, there's all this other stuff going on that I haven't hadn't been paying attention to.

Ian Cheng 14:48

Yeah, it's not just about like, you know, your relationship and then like, you know, getting a job and like, where's your apartment, like those things feel small on psychedelics that those are like small problems. And it's good to have a little bit, this shift in perspective, like, oh, there's a lot of other things out there. And it takes so little to shift your, I guess, normative idea of what reality looks and feels like it's not that stable actually, the interpretive structure that is your your mind and your body that interprets reality stabily, man, it can be programmed and hacked. And it was worth knowing how far you could program and hack it. And so I still think about those experiences to this day. And I mean, we can get into more later, but like, it's definitely something that has influenced my work a lot.

Ben Fino-Radin 15:34

That's, that's interesting to hear. And I think makes a lot of sense, because something I was gonna say is that, you know, I think that artists who begin their careers working in the motion graphics world, I think that there are, there's very few who, you know, like you, and I think of like Tabor Robak, who just like have worked in the industry, like, as a professional, and then make that leap into the contemporary art world. And I think one of the reasons for that is just that there is such a high bar of craft that has to be developed, and just like, getting getting inside that process, and it's just so painstaking, and just like, really, really specific and like you were saying, so left brain.

Ian Cheng 16:24

Sure

Ben Fino-Radin 16:25

You know, when I did my MFA, I was surrounded by a lot of animators, like people who are going on to do it professionally, and dabbled a bit in it myself and that was something I noticed that it can actually just be very difficult to be practiced in that specific hand skill, that craft and then also just be mentally loose enough to be making the art and to be making good art.

Ian Cheng 16:46

Yeah, I think what you're saying is really true, you know, the craftsmanship of making visual effects and that includes everything from modeling, rigging, virtual lighting, all the way up to like animation, which is I have so much respect for but it's extremely labor intensive, is almost a whole different part of your mind than what's required to have imagination and taste in a way about what direction you're even headed. Like, what are you making an animation of? versus, like, Can I make a good animation, they're very different parts of the brain and it's hard to reconcile those two things. I always think I'm always amazed by see movies where it's like, like a Shane Carruth movie like Upstream Color where it's like every department is him. There's something like Da Vinci about it, but there's also must be something wrong with you in a way cuz I mean, I've been in that position myself where like, Oh, I know how to do a little bit of everything, I'm just gonna do it myself. I've definitely had that attitude at various stages in my art practice. And it's always come at a huge cost, either physically, like my health, or it's led me down a rabbit hole that was unnecessary, like just obsessing over one detail because I really didn't want to face my other 10 other jobs on the same project. But yeah, it's it's a it's a challenge to balance. I think the upside actually of having worked at Industrial Light magic and actually been exposed that entire tech stack that's required to make that final image. I think it's really been beneficial because it's helped me be able to interpret the answer "no", correctly now as someone who not now I work with other people who do some of that. Knowing what is possible not possible to some degree has been really beneficial. Like I remember, the director, David Fincher, he directed his first movie was Alien 3 and he was, I think it's like not that bad. He was kind of jerked around by the studio. He had all these senior like cinematographer and like editor, and even actors who he was just a kid at the time, they were all telling him "No, you can't do that." and he vowed after that movie to learn everything there is to learn about every department so that he could always fight the "no" with his own information and experience, even if the no actually then was right. He could at least, you know, say with confidence, like that's the right decision. People say no, for all kinds of reasons. Maybe they're having a bad day, maybe it's just too much trouble. Maybe it seems impossible, except for if you thought about this one other way. And so I really don't regret any of that experience of just learning every single aspect of visual effects production. I think it's given me a lot of like, credibility and authority to, I don't know, push for things that I really want, I think are within the realm of possibility.

Ben Fino-Radin 19:28

So eventually, somewhere along the line, Ian realizes that he wants to full time pursue becoming a contemporary artist, and he moves to New York City to start this new chapter.

Ian Cheng 19:39

I went to grad school after Industrial Light magic and went to Columbia, and I got my MFA in Visual Arts there. I didn't do very much there I still was trying to figure out myself out I didn't make much work. And shortly after, I started making work using the video game engine Unity. I was literally sitting in Whole Foods on Houston St. Trying to figure out who I was and what I was doing. If this is like on my day off from working at the time, I was working for the artist Pierre Huyghe, and another artists, Paul Chan, who were both very inspiring. Yeah, super inspiring. Obviously artists, I'm inspired by but inspiring kind of mentors and people to work for at the time. I learned so much about just the rhythm and texture of how to live and be an artist, you know, from Paul, I really learned how to say no to things. And from Pierre, I really learned I don't know this kind of sensitivity to stupidity is the wrong word. But he said this one thing to me once where he said, Every, every artwork needs a coefficient of stupidity. And by that he didn't mean that it had to be stupid, but that it had to like, speak very clearly and plainly to the unconscious, it was important that art isn't like presents itself as smart, or trying to be smart, or trying to make you smarter, that it actually gives you an image or an experience. And then you break that image or experience with maybe one gesture. A great example, near the end of when I was working with him was his Documenta piece where he had one of the features was his dog, and had one pink leg. I asked him why, why just the pink leg, why not other kind of interventions on the dog. He said, Oh, you just need to break the image of dog just once in a clear way. So that the mind of the viewer still understands is a dog and then understands you've broken the image of the dog. If you start adding like a hat and maybe like some artificial like feathers, then you start playing dress up and roleplay. And then you're no longer breaking the image of a dog, you're just turning a dog into an actor essentially. And so this coefficient of stupidity really stuck with me that aren't really is powerful once you start talking to the conscious and unconscious speaks in stupid terms. And by stupid, I don't mean like unintelligent, I mean, like, pre frontal cortex. If that makes sense. And so those two experiences like really, really shaped my understanding of what it might mean to be an artist, I still hadn't even realized I should be an artist or I could be an artist at the time. But working for them kind of set a certain model for me in my mind.

Ben Fino-Radin 22:15

You were, you hadn't fully settled on being an artist? I mean, you were getting your MFA Columbia. So what was that?

Ian Cheng 22:22

Yeah, but it was shattering. I don't know what your experiences doing and MFA was but for me, it was like, Oh, I don't know who the hell I am. What I have to say, what in what form I'm going to say it Meanwhile, everyone is either… This is my projection. It seemed like every other MFA student was prolifically making the thing that they were meant to make. I remember just walking the hallway. And some of the other painters, for example, there's like stacks of canvases that they had completed. And they were just they didn't have room in their own studio. So they're storing in the hallway, their finished paintings. And I just I felt totally lost and with nothing to contribute. And in there I was studying art where arts the one place I realized where you can choose your own problems. But that is a huge responsibility and a huge void if you don't have a problem to choose. And no one teaches you how to choose that problem in art. And at least at the time in art school, everyone was very obsessed with either professionalizing or being hypercritical. And I think that was that's the mistake of art school, I think it's persist To this day, this idea that part of your art school education is just to read a lot of critical theory, absorb like kind of pseudo Marxist positions, and try to somehow do a weird gymnastic acrobatic dance with maneuvering that stuff through an art world where it's quite the opposite. It was very confusing being in grad school. So coming out of grad school, you know, I went to grad school to be an artist and I left grad school thinking maybe it's not for me, or maybe I don't have it, have anything to offer this place. And I also felt, I don't want to have to think this way. I don't wanna have to think every project is about self reflexive criticality at the get go. And when I know in my heart that the art that really moves me has some energy of aliveness has some energy that talks the unconscious first, maybe the content is something critical, but I think arts first job is to kind of make a neurological bridge to the viewers mind and like, help them kind of transcend their current state. And the only way I think a person's open enough to do that is by talking to their unconscious mind, not their conscious mind. Not their not their left brain, but their right brain. That's what art always was. I think it kind of in grad school, I think it loses its way a little bit. And I think the artists I really love they always seem to rediscover that same old archetypal fact, but art at the very least has to talk to the unconscious. Whether it's transcendent or not, you know, that depends on the nature of the artwork, how good the art was, the time that we live in all those other factors, but grad school just didn't teach me any of this. And so I left grad school feeling very unsure of who I was and what I was meant to do. Incidentally, right after grad school, the first job I applied to was like an open position a UX position at Google New York. And they did not respond at all, and thank you Google for rejecting me, because if they accepted, it was between that and working for artists at the time, I mean, I had $400 in my bank account, like I would take that Google job. And that would have led me down a entirely different life path, I think, I don't think I'd have the kids I have, I don't think I'd have the marriage, I have, my wife, I don't think I'd be making the work I'm making. So maybe I'd just do something completely different. I'm not saying that would be a bad path. But it'd be very different than where I am now. So when I finally decided to, like, you know, start to make work. You know, the big epiphany was that this whole foods on Houston Street, where on the second floor, you can, like overlook the salad bar. And I remember just sitting there trying to think of who I was, was supposed to do, just watching people, you know, pick at the salad bar, or like, squabble with Whole Foods employee or I don't know people weirdly on dates at that supermarket. And I'm just watching like this little ecosystem, subculture that was transpiring below me and I just thought, Oh, I need to make a video game that plays itself. Like I want to make. I didn't have the word simulation on my mind at the time. But I wanted to, like simulate this sort of open ended, living mini ecosystem. And so I did a little research, I found that Unity video game engine, simple as that, and I just started, I said, I'm gonna dive into this, I don't know about you. But at that age, like, when you like discover a new thing, you have just a little bit of enough energy in it, you can just go super deep into it. So I just went super deep into like, C sharp scripting, and like how to just wrangle everything and code out that Unity game engine. And so for years, I was making these simulations on my own. And then, around 2015, my girlfriend now my wife, Rachel rose, she introduced me to one of her friends, Veronica So at the time was, you know, she used to be a lead singer of her band, then she was in fashion, then she was in trend forecasting. And then at the time, she was starting to produce indie video games for like a indie video game incubator in New York. And she said, we should meet to Rachel's credit, she said to me, Ian, like you want to do more and more complex things with your simulations. You don't have to do it all yourself. And this goes back to your earlier point about this tech stack and learning all the nitty gritties of everything, how that can be so consuming of one person's mind that how can you have a vision for what to do with it? As an artist? Your job is primarily First of all, to have a vision, I think, but then of course, that's necessary but insufficient, you have to be able to do it. And what parts of it you do, I think became a question for me because she could, Rachel to Rachel's credit, again, she could see us getting really nerdy about certain aspects of making simulations, while harboring larger visions. But just feeling all there's never enough time to make all the features or expand the AI in the way that I want. And she's like, talk to Veronica, maybe she can help you. Met with Veronica. You know, I don't know, we just had chemistry and energy. And you know, I think of her as like my sister now. But really, she's been a key part of she has been the producer of all my work since 2015. And it's a multi hatted job on one hand, you know, she helps me hire for roles that the particular project needs. But she's also like, as the sounding board who I trust the most, you know, there's a lot of dark days as an artist where you don't know what you're doing, or you kind of lose the plot or she's there to remind me of like, what energy I was thinking of when I first got excited about project and then I got her excited about the project, she's always there to remind me of that initial energy, which is always the truest energy, the most unconscious energy that I think undergirds a project. Yeah, so it's been a very productive and expansive relationship with her as my producer. And so since working with her, you know, we've slowly in a way like gathered a loose group of people that used to be in New York and now people are everywhere, especially post COVID who we work with and production is expanding, expanded as we were able to secure a bigger budgets to do bigger projects.

Ben Fino-Radin 29:11

And when it comes to your pieces that are manifested, you know, as like large scale installations. Do you have a physical studio space where you play around with that kind of stuff? Or do you really just use the installation as the opportunity to like really kind of like render something for the first time?

Ian Cheng 29:28

It's the the latter, it's the I use the installation as… it's trippy man, like, it's, it's not the way to do it. But you know, I have a very small shoe box studio on Canal Street. There's some computers in there, and it's a place to meet and it's a place for me to, like, you know, like, sit quietly by myself when I need to. But everything happens in Maya or SketchUp, with exhibitions and, you know, I have to say, working for especially Pierre I remember we were… This one show he did at Marian Goodman gallery where he first premiered these three aquariums for the first time. Like I remember him obsessing about the exact size of the aquarium, each aquarium and the exact plinth size, and then the benches that would accompany it, I remember how sensitive he was to the user experience of the exhibition. And that always stuck with me as a value that I hold today. And so now when I design exhibitions on Maya, or SketchUp, I mean, I'm anal down to the inch, like what is happening with every element of the architecture, how I imagine is going to feel but I think having working for here, I have some internalized sense of what six feet means versus a five foot screen versus a six foot screen, I somehow have internalized all that by working at his studio. And then when I brought that to just doing it purely virtually, in digitally in my own work, I don't know, I kind of have, I guess a sixth sense about scale. Now, I'm wrong sometimes. And I have to, like, you know, suffer the consequences of that and readjust, but definitely helped just to work for someone who was so sensitive to every detail the experience of the space, it didn't have to look good. It didn't even have to architecturally make sense but how to feel right. And that feeling is something that you can only do by trial and error. And I think a lot of trial and error happened like working on exhibitions appear I feel very lucky as an artist having had that experience because not every artist has that and it's hard getting exhibitions to feel right. And in a way that's the first portal that I think as a viewer you you experience unconsciously even before you really pay attention to the work.

Ben Fino-Radin 31:38

I'm curious like what a typical day of practice looks like for Ian?

Ian Cheng 31:43

Yeah, I mean, it changes you know, it's definitely changed post COVID but I would say there's a few elements that never changed and that are I still really value and tried to do. The first thing I do is writing technique called morning pages. And it's a really basic exercise. But it's basically you sit down in the morning and you just write down without stopping for and you can set a time I usually do it for like 20 minutes, but it can even be five minutes you just write down everything that's on your mind. And of course you know what's often on my mind if I'm in the middle of project is like a lot of anxiety I have a lot of anxiety about how things are going if they're gonna go the right way. There's so many creative problems that are unsolved and seem really insurmountable the day before and I just start writing them down. And the mornings really important because I learned that least about myself I think that's true of other people too, that my brain is just much more pliable and open in the morning and so I just started writing things down and inevitably all those anxieties are now on the page now live there they don't live inside me and then they start kind of if I keep writing and I stick to the time and naturally morphs into either an idea or just a more positive thought and sometimes a creative solution and when on really good days the anxieties actually that get written out core themselves down to the actually the one anxiety that I really have no I found that usually when I'm anxious it's not that I'm anxious about 10 things although it feels that way. And I'm actually anxious about that one thing that then has all these side effects that color all these other much more easy problems to resolve but the one thing I'm anxious about or scared about that's the thing that I need to core down to and really just take a look at and decide what to do about it whether to you know run away from it or to chase it and morning pages I mean without fail that's why that's why I swear by like it unearths all that stuff with ease it just comes out of you and so I totally swear by doing this I do it every day during the pandemic and got kind of like loose but I used to do it every day and now I'm resuming doing it every day so that's one thing that's that's really stayed as a kind of habit and then usually by like 10am 1030 I'm just kind of working on whenever I was working on the previous day trying to apply what I learned about myself and morning pages and then I have a stupid but I think useful rule that I don't check your touch email until 1pm which is extremely annoying for a lot of people I check it i'm not i'm not in total like luddite here like I do check it just like you know check just to see and I like clear out all the spam but I don't respond to email. Wait until it's like 1pm cuz you know some emails do not like emails, they're like, they're like hydras you know, they have like five heads and they asking like five questions and inside those questions is literally like a week's worth of thought that you have to put into it. So like emails are secretly not emails. It's really evil what emails are, and so I swore to myself, like let's treat the morning as sacred, you know, you know, I got my morning pages I unearth my anxieties, I find some creative solutions. I tackle some problems from a more creative place and then like I leave the afternoon for just kind of either grunt work that I would like to do if I listen to a podcast or something and or emails and meetings and now more and more spending time with my kids.

Ben Fino-Radin 35:05

So I guess there's kind of like two maybe three fundamental forms that your work takes. You know, you have your simulations that are both software but they're ultimately manifested on some kind of hardware and you generally treat that as some kind of physical object… things are manifested physically very specifically, whether it's a screen leaning against a wall or it's a massive array of like, you know, modular LEDs. And then you have your drawings which my understanding is those are kind of almost like documentation of your research in a way it's like you are developing these worlds and it seems like you do a lot of that on paper and I really loved it the first time I saw those and I was curious to ask, you know, your your drawing style really reminds me a lot of some of the underground comics that I was really into when I was in art school. I'm curious, like, what are the influences you're drawing on when it comes to your drawing?

Ian Cheng 36:06

No one's ever asked me that before. I read a lot of comic books as a kid. I had a lot of time I read a lot of comics, you know, there was just AOL so there wasn't you know, I you know, had physical comics, just boxes of comics. And I love drawing so I would just like learn, you know, comic book anatomy as crazy as comic book anatomy was I just like, copy comic book images, tried to, like draw my own fan fiction. Just practice drawing faces in a comic book idiom. And then of course, like any other like comic person who looked in the comics, like I got into anime and then started started drawing a lot of manga stuff just for myself. And, you know, eventually to all that practice of just drawing bodies and spaceships and, you know, cliche alien jungles. I don't know like now when I need to articulate a thought to someone I work with, or even just for myself. That's just the way I draw like I just draw in this kind of pasty comic book way. I don't know. I haven't consciously thought about this at all in I guess decades but yeah, that's where it comes from. I mean, I was really into like Mobius and HR Giger. Like, like all these concept artists who were in comics, but then got kind of scooped up by Hollywood to visualize, like post Star Wars like, you know, like Jodorowsky's Dune, that kind of thing like, Alien, Blade Runner. I got really into public like this guy, Ralph McQuarrie. He did all the concept art for Star Wars. Got really into that stuff. I don't know. I think the DNA of all that is, it's not exactly I mean, it is the style and is like the kind of accessible way in which those images are drawn. They're very, like, obviously figurative and legible. But more than that, the ones that really struck me are the ones that have the facility just to draw, but it's not about the quality of drawing, it's about articulating a world. Like that's why Mobius is infinitely like inspiring for so many people. It's like, his drawings amazing, but just that's just like a side effect of him articulating a really imaginative world all the time, his imagination couldn't stop. And it was always like coherent imagination. It wasn't like an absurdist imagination, it was one of where he's just articulating entire, like alien cultures with great ease. And I think that's what always drew me to when I draw and when I think about the worlds I'm making now and I have to draw them I always try to channel that energy like oh, draw with the intention to articulate a world don't draw to make a good drawing

Ben Fino-Radin 38:33

Well mission accomplished because that's one of the things that I really love about your work that whether whether it's looking at your simulations, or a print or your drawings, it always feels like it's it's just catching a glimpse at this… It's almost like you're a traveler that's like been to this place and you're like trying to explain it to us by any means necessary and like every time you can tell it like you're only like we as the viewer are only kind of understanding it. And I really like that I like that mystery and that it feels like it's something that will always be foreign to a certain extent like it's not completely understandable.

Ian Cheng 39:17

I'm hoping with the project I'm working on our called Life After Bob it's like a full on 48 minute narrative built in the Unity game engine running live but you know, the drawings we had to make for this, both myself and I'm so excited to hire concept artists for once. Hopefully the drawings that maybe you'll eventually see from this project will articulate a world that you will see on screen I hope to kind of as much as I like the mystery too, but it's in a partial world. I hope you will be able to see this new work and have it read as legible and exciting to like dive more deeply into it.

Ben Fino-Radin 39:52

Fantastic. Can't wait. Your work does take these different forms, whether it's software or a print that you hang on the wall or a small drawing that you hang on the wall, And I would even argue the documentation that comes with your work is also very much kind of an artifact. But I'm curious, you know, when when somebody collects one of your pieces, what do they… what do they get materially?

Ian Cheng 40:14

Ah, very simple, they get an app, and very few supplementary files around it, maybe a link to a live documentation that's like updated and the app, the the Unity app itself, that's what they get. That's it. I think you're bringing something up for me that I hadn't really fully realized for myself, which is, I'd like to travel lightly, like, yeah, making simulations and I can make that my computer anywhere. I make drawings, not paintings to articulate thought, because it's fast, it's cheap, and it's easy. The other thing I started doing, and I wanna do more of is I want to write more about this idea of worlding. And try to articulate that in either blog form or like an ebook form. But again, it's like a book form, it's like pretty lightweight. And this thing we're talking about, about DNA, and Shakespeare and the Bible, it's like, I think I'm just attracted to feeling light on my feet, even if the work itself can meet, as you say, sometimes very Baroque and dense, and lots of interrelated systems and, or like narrative ideas, I really want to just live lightly, and I think, think I extend that to what a collector gets. I mean, I know other artists do amazing things where they like, they package it very nicely, or there's some physical like, items like custom key chain, or like engraved box or something, I just never went down that route, I wanted to make a collector feel as lightweight as I feel, making it.

Ben Fino-Radin 41:36

A fair amount of the artists that we've spoken to so far are, you know, much later on in their careers. So they've had to deal with a good number of conservation issues. But with somebody who, you know, relatively speaking is still kind of at the beginning of your journey. As a professional artist, I'm curious if you have had to contend with issues of conservation much so far, you know, have have things aged and obsolesced in complicated ways that you've had to deal with?

Ian Cheng 42:05

Well, with the simulations they’re, you know, a lot of them are by design meant to kind of just run forever, and the kind of accumulated emergent changes that happen on it, which are not infinite. I mean, there are there's some kind of boundary to it. Those just keep occurring forever. And I have to say, like, I've had this conservation conversation a few times with various institutions and they always ask me, like "oh, do you do like Nam June Paik route, where you like, save the CRT monitor" and in my case save the like, I don't know the Mac Mini or the iMac of circa 2015? "Or like, will your studio like being slaved to upgrade it forever for us?" And it's a catch 22 I don't know which way to do it and the only thing I've always come back to is, well, if you think of software that's well supported, like the Unity ecosystem, and Unity as a software company really dedicated to supporting all the indie game developers, I mean, they don't know about as artists, or maybe they're becoming aware of it now, but supporting the community of people who use their software, as long as they're incentivized to maintain Unity, I suppose and Apple's gonna not die tomorrow, I suppose you can count on the network effect of these bigger players in the ecosystem of technology, helping preservation indirectly and that's always been my kind of answer to long term preservation questions, because I actually don't know which is the better way do you emulate and maintain hardware and software of its time? Or do you upgrade the software in the work itself, and for me, the DNA of the simulations, especially like emissaries and Bob, it's all in the behavior that emerges. It's not necessarily the exact graphics card. It's not exactly the exact screen, it's kind of the DNA of the behavior that emerges in those works is the thing that is, for me, the core of the artwork that needs to be maintained. So as long as that spirit of Bob, and its behaviors and the way the affordances, and landscape of possibilities in which you can change, evolve as a creature, if that's maintained, man, we can show this holographically in the future, we can beam into people's neural link brains, the sky's the limit to me. I have a my dog and my dog is a Corgi, I love that, you know, whenever maniac decided to breed the Corgi to that particular shape and size well, like that's the thing that lives on. It's the it's that those qualities that live on or like maybe closer examples, like, you know, really great literature like it's awesome that Shakespeare is basically to me Shakespeare is DNA, like you can reinterpret Shakespeare a million different ways you can re-skin it, it can be VR, Shakespeare, it can be Shakespeare in the Park, but the core DNA of that script and the the embedded intelligence of the drama, The archetypes that he captured in those in those plays. That's the thing that matters, how you re-skin it, that's just gravy. That's that's just evolution, that's this cultural evolution, taking hold and opening your arms to that evolution to happen on cultural objects, I love to get to a more clarified place where I can really designed my works with that ethic in mind where, like, you know, my dream is that all art in all cultural production is much more alive, like the way software is alive. And that it's just subject to evolutionary forces the way that nature is. I think that's more in the spirit of how I've made work, and definitely how I work I value and how I think, what would you rather be? Would you rather be like the author, the artist of Stonehenge? Or would you rather be the author of the Bible, and I would much rather be the author of the Bible, like I would much rather like have made the DNA software that can then get reinterpreted, you know, morphed and whatever, but live on in people as an active living. I mean, document that's an act of living kind of spirit or DNA of spirit, then this monumental thing that just has to be, you know, slated off as a preservation all site and just has to be frozen in time. Both are equally important. But I guess for me, I would choose the Bible, I would rather be the evolving software. It might I think it's scary for from a preservation perspective, though, maybe not for you, I think. But some people I've talked to, they're like, "wait, like, Did you say CRT or no CRT?"

Ben Fino-Radin 46:25

Is there anything that we haven't talked about that you were hoping we would that you'd like to dig deeper into?

Ian Cheng 46:31

I mean, personally, I've really, in the last, I would say, a couple months, I've been obsessed. This is like maybe a COVID thought that just kind of brewed in me. I've been obsessed with this idea that we touched on earlier that art really has to talk to the unconscious and a writer I really love called Venkatesh Rao. He said on Twitter, like spirituality, is sensitivity to unsystematized realities. I thought that was such a beautiful definition of spirituality. And I think what he was actually trying to say is that it is the human tendency to want to rationalize or systematize things you don't understand. And we obviously live in a very volatile changing crazy world right now. And the knee jerk reaction is to either systematize it, or like deny that exists so that just trouble goes away, and things return to a normalized state of reality. And his big thesis is that we're undergoing an irreversible, like weirding where things won't get normal again, they'll just get weirder. And thing that has to change as us internally how we deal with weirdness. And so that led me to think that, you know, art can help here. And if myself as an artist, I think about this daily now to remind myself, I also think, for artists in general that to be in touch with one's unconscious, that's the best evolved way we internally have to deal with unsystematized realities and live with it. You know, when you dream, at night, it's your brain trying to deal with something in your life that's unsolvable at the moment that your rational, awake, frontal cortex brain just can't do on its own. That's why you have to dream it first to kind of just grope out the answer, it's going to be kind of wrong kind of messy, kind of associative. But that's the first step to kind of surfing and facing on systematized realities. And so I've just become obsessed with focusing my own work on trying to talk first in the language of the unconscious to the viewer. Of course, I'm very concrete things I want to like, content that I want to share with the viewer. But I think just finding the language to talk to the viewers unconscious in the case of Life After Bob, it's starting with a very, very, very narrative approach. Like literally it's a 48 minute narrative, you watch it like an episode of television, and that is, you know, the way that music is as fluid a way to talk to your unconscious and your body is as we know, music to be. Obviously we are creatures of narrative now, especially with streaming television. That's how we all plug into talking to our unconscious every night when we turn on Netflix. And I feel like that language shouldn't be shunned within art not that anyone is particularly shunning it. But there is narrative does get a bad rap in art. Because you can tell bad narratives and you can reprogram people narratives, historically, of course, but it is still I mean, hold out it is one of the ways to talk to unconscious and we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater, I think unconscious needs more respect. And as a way with dealing with the crazy reality we live in, that in psychedelics, with like all the psychedelic research to deal with people with terminal illness, like there's no rational way to deal with death. It's such a deep psychological, physiological problem, like maybe we have to talk to the unconscious more to deal with it. Maybe it already knows a lot. And we just have to tap into it. Maybe you know more about yourself than you know about yourself. And she's all data that's just kind of deep in the hard drives back there in your brain, but you need something like a psychedelic catalyst, or really good art that talks to the unconscious to unlock some of that stuff

Ben Fino-Radin 49:59

Have there been any art viewing experiences for you that have been on that level of like you feel like they really changed the way you thought about the world or saw the world in a meaningful way.

Ian Cheng 50:11

The one thing that comes to mind immediately is Rachel night my wife and I, we went to Paris in 2013, together to see Pierre Huyghe's retrospective at the Pompidou. And you think oh it's just a retrospective, I hadn't, I was no longer working in a studio anymore. And I just wanted to see what he had been up to. And I the experience of being in that show, you know, we went back twice, paid admission twice. There's something so uncanny about that show. It's so strange where he had not only were all his works, technically there as a retrospective, okay, it fulfills that. But they were done in this kind of deliberately palimpsest messy way things on top of things, to the extent where like some of the architecture was just the previous show's architecture, which was a Mike Kelly show, where he had just left the walls in the wall labels and his cut through them very brutally, and then just kind of stuck on his work on top. It felt like if you could ever do institutional sediment or collage on top of previous shows, that's what this felt like. And just the wildness and the freeness of that even the catalog itself. It's like his name was all fucked up with the letters in different places you couldn't even make out it was Pierre Huyghe unless you knew that was the catalog you're buying. The freeness to do that was both like kind of punk but deeper than punk. It wasn't just iconoclastic, it felt like a kind of almost like a command to be rewilded again. And yeah, I took a lot of inspiration from that show, it gave me a lot of energy. In the years to come from that I know it gave Rachel love energy too. When I think about shows that give me energy. They of course were the shows that talked to my unconscious and something to see something so to have, so many clear was talking about earlier, there's these like breaks in the image of what you think of as exhibition, you have an image of exhibition in your mind, neurologically. And then you encounter an exhibition that says, hey, this exhibition has all the markers of an exhibition, but breaks it in all these clear ways, not obtuse, or pretentious way, just very clear ways. I can't get over this one moment where you're watching the film of the Documenta work and the pink dog is running in the film, and then literally the pink dog, it just runs across, you know the room because it's also living there in the show. You're just like, Whoa, you can do that you can you can be this alive with art? I no question that must have been hell to put together in all the logistics and safety codes, and PETA, whatever. But it all added up to this really wild experience that I just didn't know you were allowed to do. And I think that's a good marker of art that's really alive, you ask yourself, Oh, I didn't know you're allowed to do that.

Ben Fino-Radin 53:04

Well, and back to where we began with the weight and the complexity of 3d motion graphics and the team massive teams that are required to accomplish those. It's similar with something on the scale of what you're talking about with this exhibition in the sense that there's all of these bureaucratic and logistical hurdles and it's the skill in navigating all of that as a practiced professional contemporary artist is just as critical for successful execution as the you know, actual quote unquote, art making is and it's, it's also fascinating to me that, you know, an exhibition of that quality that you know, to have such an impact sounds like it had on you, it requires this almost perfect timing of opportunity, you know, the institution being open to something that ambitious, and also just that particular artists being ready for it.

Ian Cheng 54:05

Totally it is a perfect storm. And I can't help but think that there's a there's a branch of art now that's heading toward, you know, paid experiential, you know, Team Lab like things, I can't help but think, man, the thing that like unites that, and that Pierre Huyghe, retrospective is this. This sense of aliveness, but if only like this idea of experiential art, if they just modeled it off of that Pierre Huyghe retrospective, I would have a lot of hope for experiential art, I still hold out hope for it. But right now it's like super like it's amazing on one hand, but also quite overly digital and tacky oftentimes, optimized for Instagram. And I think, you know, the other end of that spectrum is like, maybe the holy end of that spectrum would be like James Turrel's crater, and I can't wait to see that thing. But somehow, like Pierre's retrospective, is a third way in a way and I wish you're right to say That it's the right artists in the right time to be able to pull something off like that it's so specific that in a way, it's not a third way that can be turned into some protocol for many other kinds of shows to be like that. Something of that spirit, that level of aliveness, the trouble to make things out alive. You know, I've never paid twice for an exhibition, I paid twice for an exhibition who does that? I'd never even do that even for a movie, but I did that for this.

Ben Fino-Radin 55:24

Ian, thank you so, so much for this conversation. This has been really enriching for me, and it's just such a luxury to have an hour and a half to sit down and chat with you like this. So I really appreciate it.

Ian Cheng 55:37

Yeah, it's a huge pleasure and I wanted to do this with you for a while, so thank you for asking.

Ben Fino-Radin 55:41

And, as always, thank you, dear listener for joining me for this week's conversation. If you enjoyed hearing about Ian's work while you are in luck, because that project that Ian mentioned that he was working on back when we recorded this interview. Well, it's on view right now at The Shed. Life After Bob is on view until December 19. It's a 48 minute long narrative film animation. And when I saw it, I was just flabbergasted. The work is a deeply weird and stunningly gorgeous mishmash of Ian's, simultaneously glitched out and yet refined videogame aesthetics and it's really just a treat to see what I think is Ian's first foray into well, filmmaking. So do yourself a favor and if you're in New York City, go see it. And lastly, before we go, I want to ask you one more time, a little favor, as I mentioned at the top and as you probably noticed, while listening to the podcast, there are no commercials here we are a nonprofit operation. So when I say at the end of this podcast every week that we are a sponsored project of the New York foundation for the arts. All that means is when you go to art and obsolescence.com and click on Donate, your donations will all be managed and handled by the New York foundation for the arts. And operating costs for the show are incredibly low because if it wasn't already obvious, this is a one person operation and I'm doing everything myself. So really this is about supporting our ability to support artists equitably that come on the show. So if equity and supporting artists is important to you, please help me make that happen by going to artandobsolescence.com And if you are in a position to help you can make your tax deductible donation there other ways to help subscribe if you haven't already, wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple podcasts, overcast Stitcher, etc. Follow us @artobsolescence on Twitter and Instagram, share the clips, we're posting their tell a friend about the show. All of that helps immensely. Thanks for anything you can do to support this show. I deeply appreciate it. But most of all, thanks for listening. It's always great having you here. Have a great week. Stay safe. My name is Ben Fino-Radin. And this has been Art and Obsolescence.