Emissary's Guide To Worlding

What is a World? How do I create a World? How do I keep a World alive? And when should I set it free?


There is an unnatural art emerging, ripe for our strange and complex times: Worlding.


Emissary's Guide To Worlding is for anyone interested in bridging the complexity Worlding with the finitude of human psychology. Reflecting on his experience making Emissaries, artist Ian Cheng derives practical methods for seeing and making Worlds as a whole-brain activity. To create a World, we must summon the artistic masks who already live inside us but rarely get to exercise their power. We will get to know the masks of the Director, the Cartoonist, the Hacker, and the Emissary.


Learn how to:

* Look at Worlds you inhabit as a choice

* Befriend the artistic masks inside you

* Exercise your masks via the practice of Worlding

* Make Worlds that come alive and outlive you

* Engineer meaning and purpose

* Find agency in chaos (bonus!)


As we find ourselves caught between unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones, Worlding becomes a vital practice to help us navigate darkness, maintain agency despite indeterminacy, and appreciate the multitude of Worlds we can choose to live in and create. Whether you are creating art, games, institutions, religions, or life itself:


Live to World and World to live!



Find out more about Emissary's Guide To Worlding:

http://worldto.live



About the Author

Ian Cheng (born Los Angeles, 1984) is an artist living and working in New York. He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; and group presentations at Whitney Museum of American Art; New York; Hirshhorn Museum; Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Sculpture Center, New York. 



Since 2013, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Most recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system."



For more information about the author:

http://iancheng.com