3D ANIMATION

Game Art: Ian Cheng's "Emissary in the Squat of Gods" (2015)

Matteo

Matteo

— 2 min read
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A terrific work by Ian Cheng (b. 1984, Los Angeles) which appropriates videogame aesthetics to document the history of cognitive evolution, past and future. Described as a live simulation and story, Emissary in the Squat of Gods was presented by Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, Italy) between April 23 until October 11 2015 in an exhibition curated by the most influential curator on this planet, Hans Ulrich Obrist, just in case you were still under the impression that Game Art is somehow niche or marginal. 
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Installation view, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin.On the latest issue of ArtForum, Ben Vickers provides useful contextual information about Cheng's practice:"But more aptly than the kitchen, we might picture an ancient laboratory of technoculture. The prosaically named Unity games engine, conceived very much within the confines of our existing prosaic reality, developed by the company Unity Technologies as a means to “democratize games development,”makes available an easily accessible software platform capable of rendering an infinite number of forms and imbuing each with its own specific ruleset. These rule-bound forms may be iterated, scripted, molded, and ultimately released by developers as games or as more ambiguous types of cultural production. It should be understood that Cheng’s practice is more in line with the alchemical tradition (the unpublished backstory of Newton’s historic discoveries is resonant here), rather than a broken branch from later forms of magical thinking, such as chemistry or physics, the latter of which forgoes gold and searches instead for a rationalized “God particle.” Transmuting and tinkering with base forms, Cheng’s relationship to that which is simulated is contingent on the behavioral change he observes in matter, defying any precisely quantified metric, rewriting from the observed effects of his lines of code—unpredictable reagents for the formation of the Shiba Inu’s relationship to its world, catalysts for the disruptions induced in the landscape by an “atavistic human.”(Ben Vickers, Artforum)Cheng lives and works in New York. LINK: Ian Cheng

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