Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016

Ian Cheng’s Baby feat. Ikaria is composed of three chatbots talking endlessly to one another. Their live presence animates a swirl of debris, at times suggesting a single body shared among multiple voices, each competing for agency.

The chatbots were originally intended to service online consumer interest, act as sexual partner, or assist in tech support. Here, their “conversation” bears no connection to human logic, yet tells us much about the state of the self in the digital age, underlining the inevitable weirding that will result from arti cial intelligence’s permeation into human life.