Ian Cheng, Baby feat. Ikaria, 2013

Ian Cheng: Baby feat. Ikaria, it's a work I made in 2013.

Narrator: Ian Cheng.

Ian Cheng: It's a simulation, and it features three chatbots who are normally used as a kind of customer service function. And instead of talking to a human person, I had them talk to each other. And in the process, I was very hopeful that they would generate their own conversation that would veer off into either absurd realms, or very, very repetitive and semantic nonsense. I think I've achieved that effect. But the premise of it was that the conversation would be generative and while this conversation was occurring, you would see visually on screen different, what looks like floating debris, and over time, as this conversation evolved, that debris would start to take shape and form, and you would start to hopefully see this conversation as its own sort of macro-organism, or entity.                               

In putting them together, and in putting them in this kind of video game engine where they could simulate out all their possibilities, the hope was for me as an artist to lose control, and to have my control exist at the level of setting up the experiment.