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Monday, September 18, 2017

Ian Cheng at MoMA PS1


(link)

A video game you can't play, a narrative irresolute: a scaffold to hang a flag waving new digital technologies. The flag waves complexly in the breeze, and we admire it. Of perhaps more interest than the flag itself is the simple parameters that generate such complexity, gas, a flexible surface; a problem for both meteorology as well as animation, one predictive and one representational. The elegance of schooling fish can be modeled with simple rules, stay close but not too close, and voila without leader or choreography, a coordination, a process called emergence. If there is to be interest here in storyless narratives, it is in determining the logic governing Cheng's boy and his dog, the subjectivity behind it, like any artwork or people's behavior, the rules behind the object. “We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors." and in the metaphorical mirrors the rules governing Cheng's programming resembling us more interesting.