new art, flag art, good art, portal art with Ian Cheng

good evening everyone welcome my name is Nicholas DiMaggio I'm the director of the Berkeley Center for new media I'm standing in for my dear colleague Shannon Jackson tonight Shannon is the associate vice chancellor for the Arts and Design and the convener of the larger arts and design Monday night series of which are BCAM ATC series is a is an essential and and very happily a part of that larger vision for what it means to have lectures here on Monday night at the bam/pfa this is the part of the lecture of the lecture introduction usually where I say please come to our lecture next week but as you may or may not know next week as our final ATC lecture and final a plus d Monday night lecture we are hosting the amazing and indomitable Angela Davis in a 2018 Regents lecture and the lecture is sold out we went through we've gone to a ticketing system for our high audience draws and but I do want to say while the Angela Davis lecture is sold out in this room I wanted to mention two places you can go to on campus to hear and see that lecture live and most essentially be wired in for the Q&A and discussion which is going to be a large part of that lectures of that event and and concret can contribute to it these locations are also posted on the A plus T Monday night web page and at bcnf berkeley.edu the first location for community members is north gate hole that's the journalism school doors open there at 6:30 p.m. and the second place second current live-streaming location for community members is the multiple Multicultural Center in the Student Union MLK building so both of those places are open to you for next Monday night's event this event will be live cast but not recorded per Professor Davis's request so your only chance is to see it at one of the live streaming locations in person or we will be streaming and also live on our website BCM berkeley.edu but that's not nearly as fun as seeing in a room full of excited people so with that I give over to my dear and incredibly valued colleague and Walsh from our practice to introduce tonight's speaker hi I'm Ann Walsh I am a professor in our practice and I want to just start off by saying that we are especially grateful to end for coming for spending the evening here with us tonight for spending the day with graduate students and colleagues you would think that you were interviewing for a job given the hours that you're that you're devoting to us so think really thank you so much it's been kind of a dream of mine to have Ian here for quite a number of years and given his super super loaded travel schedule or feel especially fortunate I had the good luck of meeting Ian when I was a new assistant professor here and he took a video class with me 12 years later I am still showing his work the work that Ian made then it was deft uncanny and funny in the unsettling ways that his current work is already for example I think Ian was asking what is sentience who and what has it and suggesting as so much of his work does now that intelligence is not just in your head it's distributed between you and all the objects and other people that are around you I'm quoting you actually okay pause from the script to say something that I thought about while I was driving here which is that I have often felt a little ashamed that I never played video games like it was it showed how much of a nerd I am that I didn't play video games didn't care about them wasn't wasn't drawn to them and I've I've I've tried to figure out what like why cuz I love cereal television I love other forms of narrative and I think actually getting to know a ins work has helped me understand a little better why it wasn't until I started looking at what he makes that I understood better what was not attractive to me and that was the kind of narrow that was the kind of narrow narrow storytelling of the video game and for me the openness and kind of the the weirdness that the good weirdness not the bad weirdness of of his simulations that are feel really open and it feels permitted to be boring you know there's permission for nothing to happen and for me that's also a huge relief as a viewer to be able to observe kind of nothing closely so I'm grateful to you for that to what he and makes now is better described by him than me so I'm gonna leave that to him but he likely won't say much about the institutional reach of his work he's too modest for that so I'll do that it's my job cuz it's remarkable in just the last four years he's created solo exhibitions at the serpentine gallery in London one of which is up right now MoMA ps1 in New York the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh the Migros Museum in Zurich Pilar Aquarius Gallery in London the triennial of Milano and his work has been included in group exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen the Yokohama triennial the Hirshhorn Museum and sculpture garden in DC the Whitney in New York the taipei biennial the 12th being on the lyon in france and the sculpture center and that's just an excerpt he holds an MFA from columbia and a dual BA in cog psy and art practice from so we are really really proud to have you as an alumnus and please welcome Ian Chang thank you and it's really trippy being back there I haven't been here on campus for twelve years and I should just say now that like I got you in 2006 and I'm profoundly profoundly grateful to and Walsh and Katherine Sherwood and Greg Niemeyer you know during college we just filled with all these conflicting emotions and life seems both dull and like chaotic and shocking at the same time and you know you always try to look for little sparks in life and they definitely sparked something in me they were sparks for me at that moment and for that I'm really profoundly grateful one everything you see here I'm 200% the beneficiary of what they sparked in me so I'm really happy to be here I didn't have anything formally planned I just brought my computer and I thought I'd just show you some files it's kind of open mic night for me so but I thought maybe and of illuminating thing to do would be to kind of walk you through how I make a project and as I make a project I store a lot of things on my computer during the process of it I thought maybe I could just go through two recent my two most recent projects and give you a kind of peek under the hood I want to say briefly that after I graduated Berkeley as an undergrad in 2006 I worked at industrial and magic for about a year and a half and then you know I met so many amazing super talented literally genius people there but after a year at industrial and magic where they were doing like movies like transformers and parts of the Caribbean and doing all kinds of innovative like motion capture research and simulation research I found I was meeting too many people who were there since return the Jedi who still wanted to make their feature film or wanted to make a sculpture and that the creative burden of being at such a creative place took something out of them and I made a very I think the rat feeling made seemingly irrational misters at that time it seems rational now that I really wanted to find a way to choose my own problems and so I moved to New York I went to Columbia for grad school and for those of you who are in grad school here I can tell you now that I didn't do anything in grad school I was totally lost I checked my email for two years I didn't make anything and there are people who are making prolific amounts of work so much work that it filled the hallways I couldn't get into my own studio and my studio at Columbia had like black mold in it so I was like kind of getting drowsy all the time and it was only afterwards where I encountered a second set of mentors I started working for two artists one called Paul Chan another called Pierre weed who both besides me really like loving their work I really learned what it felt like to like live and be an artist like because I was around them so often and I really understood like their metabolism when sounds weird but like I understood like when they ain't like when they exercised how they needed the time in the morning to be away from people but that was a really fertile time to create a problem make creative decisions and I really came to admire how they structured their time their day and that this became a real cornerstone and model for me for figuring out how it is I would want to make work myself and so around 2011 I started making my own work more frequency they wanted their own morning so then that means I had a free morning which was the perfect time to be creative and around just to speed it up in 2013 I started making what I call simulations and I think of a simulation as a kind of video game that plays itself I was sitting in Whole Foods in on Houston Street in New York and I had been making these animations and I was like really annoyed and hateful of myself because Anna you have to perfect every single second I mean you feel this compulsion where you know 24 frames a second each second really matters and you could just articulate the movement of a hand or I blink forever and I really wanted to escape my own kind of perfectionism and I thought if I can make a video game engine just animate things for me then I could still be a control freak but I could be controlled like freak from like all the way out here not here and this started what I call simulations I'm gonna not show you the early ones but I'll start with the one that I made just last year and it really starts with a lot of drawing you know a simulation it's a video game that plays itself there's a huge technical component to it we can get into the weeds of that if you guys are interested but where it really starts is something really easy programming is really it's become easier for me but it's really hard and I always feel that I want to start with like the easiest possible thing what's the easiest most facile thing I can do that's really expressive I can just get ideas out that can start to plan a world and so it starts with drawing and so I can just I'm gonna show you just a few drawings to show you that's more recent work called emissary sunsets the self and it started really with this dumb little drawing here I mean it's like this stupid art is really stupid sometimes it started with this stupid drawing and I don't you know what this is like these people in a bubble and then they're meeting this other thing which is like kind of super organism composed of other smaller parts so it's like a group with like a kind of orgiastic group or something and the two combined would be the meeting of two groups the meeting of two super organisms one was a collection of like a mob and one was a kind of macro super organism and I thought that they should be in a landscape together and that they I would simulate how they negotiate each other's kind of presence and I'm just gonna show you some drawings because this is where it really begins it's just keep going and I do this for maybe I don't know I worked on these just for like a month and a half in the mean time I had started working with a producer which is a really strange thing like you know you think of an artist being really solo or working on your own and for those of you who are artists here you know that being by yourself is like horrible I mean it's it's great for me because I'm introverted but it's horrible in a sense that like when the project gets really tough like you start to doubt every aspect of what you're doing really get lost in the weeds and so I hired a producer and I didn't know what a producer was I just know that what she became her name is Veronica she used to be a video game producer she just kind of became like my mom or like a gym coach and it's really important for me to have that voice telling me what it is that was important about this project in the first place not even what's important like what the original feeling of the project was she'll point me back to like a dumb drawing like this stupid drawing and she's the one that reminds me that that drawing was somehow still important even when I can't see it and so you know before her I would just kind of talk to myself and now she could just talk to me and um having her really like guided the process through going from these drawings to starting to think about really basic narrative and then more broadly thinking about the idea that I have all these like thoughts and ideas about like characters and a landscape but all that can mean nothing if it's not contained in something and so she really helped me whom the idea that I needed a container and it sounds so stupid and basic but the container of a simulation was really important to come across like the idea of a simulation being a video game that plays itself really allowed me to have a form to stick everything in and make sure it accumulates into something it's sort of like yeah it sort of just having a way to name what it is that you do and have the energy kind of pull into one place and so I was we were kind of working through these ideas and these these drawings the development of these characters really came from a previous insecurity which was the simulations I first started it without Veronica where these kind of chaotic systems again I keep saying their video game that plays themselves so in my initial simulations were kind of a group of it's kind of objects I was interested in start to put them together and wanted to see what properties would emerge when you put unlike things together and start to simulate their physics for example but over time they start to feel really meaningless and at around 2015 I hit this point with Veronica where I felt that it's interesting and fun as it was to make these early simulations they felt inherently kind of meaningless and I was wondering like well that's not a problem but what's the opposite of meaninglessness it's something that's meaningful and how do we really easily get meaning in life well it's definitely for me at least it's through stories stories are like just bread and butter like we were creatures and narrative stories are the easiest way to convey meaning at the same time I was trying to make a simulation that I didn't have to control everything I didn't want to control the meaning I didn't want to make him moral at the end of the story I didn't want the story about a fixed ending and so I really so I started to think okay if I make a simulation but start to include things like these characters who have a set of kind of narrative goals then I can begin to put them in productive conflict with the larger simulation I'll show you some in a sec but just to say that these more recent simulations were really a way to combine something that is narrative like these characters they look like characters they have a certain backstory they have a certain sort of bias or prejudice about things they like dislike and to put them in a landscape full of other characters very divergent interest like it starts to get maybe a engine or space that could generate multiple narratives and it could be both meaningful and meaningless at the same time this little abstracts I'm going to show you some stuff in a sec so the next step after kind of just drawing stuff and trying to work out a very basic narrative here's me trying to work out a narrative yeah I start to develop more allow more these kind of characters so this character eats it's called and I'm just kind of made this up but the idea being that I really wanted to create a kind of again this kind of group of characters who would mob together and I had this idea that they'd be like these kind of newer cat-like characters who when they're faced with a threat in the environment they would kind of pull together and they would in a way the the be very prejudiced towards radical changes in their environment and I started to develop ways to procedurally morph almost like a mascot character so there was like the mean mascot like you know again I want to save time and energy at work so I make one character like the top top left corner and then I tried to create procedural or programmatic ways to morph the body and a physio physiology of the character to get everything from you know from like buff guys it's teenager to like these children a kind of a whole kind of community of them and then there's one character this character here who's really in love with the other stuff the other group which is this kind of mutated plant and this character is almost like the tree hugger character of this this group of characters these characters are really scared of these like mutating plants and this one character is like super in love with and again it's just going back this idea of narrative which is I wrote this very beautiful thing which is like you know a narrative is like a routine that's been interrupted and in every instance I try to find a routine that gets interrupted that's like the source of really basic interestingness and so I felt I really needed the divergent perspective of one of these characters who's kind of like gone to other side this is the Power Rangers shot and it came out of the simulation so I want to speak really briefly about some of the technical stuff before I actually show you the simulation then I worked with my technical director and myself to really divides the underlying architecture of the other group which are I'll show you in a second he's kind of worm-like structures that grow in really kind of strange and radical ways and overtime can begin to have a kind of ambulation and overtime can begin to kind of possess or take control of these human characters and so I worked much with my technical director to really plan that out on a technical level I'll skip the AI stuff for now come back to the this is sort of planning out the AI which is just a mess this allows me again I'm talking about this idea of a container this allows me to get into my own interest from life for example in college in science like what it is that defines like a character's personality and of course we're always modeling or making simplifications about how an AI works or how a character should be modelled but you gotta start somewhere and trying to make it I actually learned a lot about how I think me myself works how people work and this is a real pleasure to me and what I want to say about the AI really briefly is that the AI in this work contains actually three a eyes within one character oh okay well let's start with those so the AI has three characters and they I being the each other within its head has three mini brains and I modeled this after idea of my own ignorance which is that I couldn't think of a way to actually make an AI that was like better than Google obviously and I couldn't think of a way to make an AI that encompassed the diversity of human behavior or even animal behavior so then I thought what if we just divide the brain in the way that maybe the brain is itself divided between different evolutionary layers so there's in the a eye devise there's a threat layer there's a threat brain there's a brain that really deals with threats and deals with fight and flight and this brain is not always used but it's it's the one that's activated when it they encounter something threatening the environment it's very rare but it comes from things like you know video games like like shooting games and he's kind of more violent video games but then for me the more beautiful layers second layer which I call it the limbic layer and this is very much the limbic layer is very much based on the sins and the sins they devise a very beautiful AI because when the Sims was really no violence it's a bunch of if you're familiar with this game it's kind of like a little dollhouse but you're attending to the kind of limbic needs of your sim like your sin in love is hungry sleepy all these kind of burning desires that grow more more urgent as time goes on to the point where you know hunger isn't threatening but becomes threatening when you get hangry right and so when you get hangry then the limbic system becomes this really potent layer in the brain that overtakes everything else so once my human are not threatened and then they're like not hungry and that well slept then finally a third layer of the brain gets activated which I called a narrative layer and in this narrative layer it starts to be a plan maybe one or two steps ahead and one two steps backwards about what it's doing and this gets threatened and interrupted many many times more so than anything else but I think this is for me it felt really truthful to how life feels I want to show you some in progress so this is again just kind of designing so the other thing that I come the worm the worm lead they are composed of a small vocabulary of parts which then can be configured into quite a wide variety procedurally of other like form shapes and kind of sculptures this is kind of the part where making art starts to become fun and I have to say like still haven't shown me that work yet but this really all this this imagery this occurs in the last like 5% of the project like 95% of making these simulations is just a pain struggle and it's just really painful and Veronica just coach them through this like a baby and but what it comes out of it is sort of like sort of like that I call it like the Alice Waters like method to make your art which is like I've built and I've I had built all the best ingredients and it's just enough 5% where it finally get to play around I get it kind of cook with it and here we see this is sort of the product of that kind of cooking and then this is the moment where I start the simulation starts to come alive and I get seeks and the behaviors that emerge here I just like populated it with all these women just coming there's no threat so they were just sort of relaxing different sort of behaviors that emerge out of us this one's the funny smile yeah like what's the schedule what's he doing baby mode too so it's clearly really happy about something to show you actual simulation oh I'll just show you some more making homes so with the world leaves like this kind of modular plant thing we devised a new physics system for it it's based on that you have a ball spring and we really tried to make something that's not that was my technical directors idea of the joke we really try to make something that felt really animated and tactile because so often in computer graphics you feel kind of rigidity to the 3d models and we wanted an underlying physics system that really had a kind of sense of life to it a ball spring model in physics is obviously very common but to use it for characters it was very uncommon and so we took that approach in order to give this kind of mm uncanny sense of life that was different from the room in which were more kind of avatar like characters this is the test of human before their own there's people so we're just trying to test how they touch again like during the process of making these things you learn a lot about what you've seen a lot of them what you have in often in video games rarely least I rarely see two characters touch often in a video game you see character like shoot each other or have some intermediate object that gets passed between them but rarely do they like hold hands or grapple with each other and I really wanted that tactile quality I think there's something more emotive and powerful about the um we started working on an underlying again out of laziness we created like a monstrous system that took one more time but it allowed for these kind of procedural behaviors of movement and animation that obviously any like self-respecting animator would never do but for me it's beautiful it's surprising it's beautiful because it's precisely because it's surprising so this was a kind of active ragdoll physics simulation of the body so the body is interpolating between a handful of motion capture animations and the fact that it's bodies entirely physics based in that when the muscles are like active it's adhering it's like hearing more to the animations and when it's more inactive it's adhering more to the physics and gravity of the simulation and then everything in between right the limbs in between maybe just the head and maybe the torso maybe we really with this guy and just make it that leg and it could really yet he still tries to walk and it gets pretty slapstick Oh we're interim let me pick something up again touching something like somehow this felt is important in making you feel a kind of physicality yes this is important come on yeah oh maybe this was it's the IQ test too one friend oh yeah things like the mass of what it's picking out matter okay okay so I don't know why it's jumping but okay so now when this is like when you start to play so we have our room in we have you know the design of it we have the worm leaves now you kind of just pop them I don't know we just kind of put them in a room together and see what happens this for me was a really magical moment it made me feel the reality of the project for the first time Oh touch some weird perspective idea the radicand made me stop it's like you're wasting time and money torture okay now yeah so again like here what you see is like this attachment of the head to this worm leaf but the carrot the humans trying to move the worm leaf was trying to ambulate in a different direction and as a result you get this sort of beautiful emergence contortion and its kind of choreography that no one really designed okay then we went into machine learning for a little bit so we tried to get the worm leaf to learn how to walk on its own through a genetic algorithm and just to explain really briefly it's it's sort of like training a dog it's like giving this kind of underlying set of this ball spring physics creatures fiery creature a goal a really basic one in this case was just trying to get to beyond these boxes and writing this simulation over and over again and each time if it gets closer it gets rewarded and being rewarded it knows to reinforce these underlying very basic neural network inside of it to know to do that more and if it gets it doesn't make it through like like this other guy next to the orange one never made through the gates it gets kind of demoted so there's a little bit of that that was he'll see more of the results of that here so kind of overall rewards for being able to actively move to effectively move not get stuck on things you I'm just going to show you again testing the physics you I'm just gonna show you a little bit of us with much level someone emphasized it's pretty boring and this was one of the qualities of a simulation that it's actually a feature not a bug it's kind of think of these simulations as you know when they were exhibited the person can watch it for five seconds or you can watching for five hours maybe wearing the simulation you're watching it really doesn't expect much of you there's no beginning middle end it's a snap as a program so if left on it can kind of just continue forever the worm these will keep mutating but human will reproduce they'll have offspring but then reinforce certain prejudices against the worm loose or not and there's day/night cycles time passes and it's a bit inspired by these kind of animal camps you see on the internet where like the San Diego Zoo might have a webcam on the Panda and it's super unremarkable for 12 hours a day and then just one minute it's like revelatory where like it besides the hobble over could set on sat caged and like break a bamboo stick took a drink of water and it's super amazing I really thought about this space of how narrative isn't can be there but not the center of gravity it's a bit like my wife is really really really into the Real Housewives of Orange County and the beautiful thing about that shows there's definitely narrative like you know over time if you've seen enough episodes like me there's a kind of story into each person's life you know their life story but it's not the center of gravity of the show the show is really this for me at least it's sort of like the sins this is kind of ambient observation of their behavior I mean the producers of the show always talk about trying to create a situation with the Real Housewives where the basic way like alcohol is present and you put together really strong fierce personalities in a room together naturally story happens drama will happen as really interested in this this is kind of paradigm of storytelling versus maybe the opposite side of that would be like a feature film where there's a beginning middle and there's whole narrative our characters learn something and I really wanted to explore this more Real Housewives there's more Real Housewives angle and that over time that there would be narratives that would emerge there is the narrative I didn't speak too much about this but there's in all the simulations recently there's always one character with a set of very clear narrative goals I almost think of it it's called emissary I think of it as the protagonist who really wants to be like in a movie but it's just stuck in the Real Housewives and it's really or I think of it maybe a Shakespearean actor who's like finally Shakespeare in the Park has all his lines memorized but then parts of dogs run through bad weather there's you know interruptions to put these two things into productive conflict the story in the simulation it's sort of a contest to see which one will will win in a way the narrative agent for this one is this sort of so bit abstract it's this yellow kind of yolk like puddle that's possessing these worm leaves and it has a very clear story to it that's been encoded into its behavior it's the only character in this entire simulation has such determinism but it's constantly being interrupted by this movement by the I call it the tree hugger you mean the one that's following it it's like overly in love with in like protecting it to actively and all the other women who are extremely prejudiced against it's kind of over mutation it's kind of speeding through this because I want to move on to this newer project which more excited about now this is this is Masseria so more recently as you can seen emissaries it was a really vast kind of not vast but there's a complication of ecosystem and had to do with making a I of all the different agents it was a bunch of a group of agents in order to get the emergent effects of agents and it was like objects and environment clans for fauna I really wanted to simplify my life in a way after making that work I really wanted to focus on one character and so I thought again about this idea of a container thought would if I could just make a creature and the creature would be the container it would be the box and if you have a box called a creature you can stick in it all kinds of interesting concerns being sticking in ideas about metabolism how the body affects the mind how the mind affects the body life cycle and of course AI and so I started making this project called Bob and Bob stands for bag of beliefs and initially started as an AI project but the more and more I worked on it the more I realized that a I really needed the body to articulate what it was what to even think or how to even think or how to even sense and so Bob became a way to think of a creature as a kind of compositional space I'm friends with quite a few painters and they always tell me like oh you gotta mind the edges and so if you think about a creature in minding the edges of a creature for painters sort of like literally mining the edges but for creatures like thinking about its life like how its born and how it dies and these became obviously super interested in life and death but to have a form or container to hold those thoughts became really useful for redirecting my energy into one thing that energy was directed towards thing called Bob so again I started with hmm with drawings I'll show you a few I had this idea that the creature had to not be a pet that had to be something like like smog and Lord of the Rings or there's a Moana from Disney there's this character of tomat oh he's like this big fabulous gay crab love shiny things and the feeling you have when you see either smuggling or the Rings or Tom Toa is that they are kind of like a real housewife doing their own thing and then this Hobbit comes in and tries to make a movie of it I'm trying to like hijack to smog into its movie and become like the third act climax but when you encounter smog and was so beautiful about what Tolkien did was that you encounter Smaug in repose in kind of a sleepy mode like smoke and no problems hoarding lots of gold and goblets and just living a life in that mountain and then the hobbits come along but was so beautiful I'm seeing a creature in both states the fierce state that we all know dragons can get into and then the state of just kind of Sleepy repose is that I think you start to see the creature as more than just a kind of Bill in or symbol excuse me a symbol but also like a creature that I don't know I you start to respect it it has its own time it had its own life that has many stories to tell and I really wanted to create a character and a creature an intern AI that really had its own life in a way like literally lived its own life and then on occasion would be sort of bothered by you or me as a viewer to actively kind of like kind of engage with it into kind of trying to reel it into our own story but that it had its own life it had its own adventures and that you could respect is something more than just a kind of Tamagotchi or cat so Bob kind of started as this this was the very one of the very first wrongs above and arts dumb I mean telling you are it's really done and starts from random places but if you trust that feeling if I trusted that feeling broad told me this was like I should just trust this strong it was sort of this idea of trying to make a creature that physically embodied I think you know kind of cartoonish way our brains are structured so on the one hand you have a sort of very focused and active kind of vigilant head almost like in the cartoonish way like your left brain and then on the other side you have this kind of fractal izing set of nodes almost like a tree we're liking an enemy or like it kind of overtime a kind of a group of like a mob of creatures that if you imagine each tip of this as a kind of mmm a member of a group you kind of get this sort of right brain feeling and I wanted initially with Bob to have it's AI in its memory be physically mapped to its body so its body was a direct reflection of how it was architected cognitively that was the original idea of Bob and I kind of just ran with it I just thought okay when Bob is angry but sort of aware and in control and well hydrated and not angry like its head would be sort of the dominant force and it would be more like a dragon and then when Bob Bob's head was really metabolically like sleepy and maybe Mountain nourished the other part of its brain its right brain would be much more active and kind of be more like a mob and take control here's a better drawing [Music] something like this so you see kind of different states yes you got mob Bob right and then you have a this is a really worn out Bob we're like no one's in control here this is a Bob bonsai Bob is like a Bob who's really settled into something it's not very adventurous really likes this idea of home it's almost like like a perfect parent or something and then Starship Bob is like the adventurer but you know as we'll see natural simulation often the aventuras Bob loses a lot of body mass like it literally can't be as like kind of flowering as Banzai Bob because it doesn't stay in one place its center of gravity its mass all has to get pruned and in order for it to physically be on the prowl more it gave me away this project gave me a way to think about the lifecycle like so how a thing grows you know often in computer animation you have a single state of the character you have it like it's like the hero model of Superman or the hero model of a soldier but you never get to see that soldier grow up from a baby and I thought it'd be so beautiful to model the entire lifecycle of a creature and to sing like that and so that gave me an opportunity to think about Bob and to get the simulation a much larger time scale I had to think about again two edges how Bob is born how Bob might grow and all the different mutations Bob's body might take and then finally how about might die [Music] watching videos so I can show you where Bob started like kind of just again oh so this relates to the previous project so again using this ball spring model which I found so beautiful and I felt like it was an idea that was under there's got a mound nourished in the last project sort of was cluttered with all this other stuff and overall this overlying narrative and the previous simulation so really again when I focus on one character and I thought the physics of this was so beautiful that it really I just really had to go to town sort of starting become something oh so here's like it trying to reach something so it uses its you know its longest appendage whichever that might be at any given time you can see it's tapering sharp changes oh this is a I thought I want to give Bob a friend but then against this I thought Bob would do well with a water buffalo and you would respect Bob more if had a relationship and life with a buffalo and proceeded your relationship with it but that got scrapped I mean I'm not against this instinct I thought that in you know only Pixar movies where there's like two characters it was like Buzz Lightyear and woody or those Nemo or like there's Nemo's dad and dory there's something about narrative even when it's open-ended as a simulation where having two characters immediately you understand a certain dynamic and it's very potent because each character can represent a kind of perspective rather than a natural person it can be a perspective that's a little bit different from the other characters perspective and they both live in the same world so they encounter the same problems but because they're either physically different or they're mentally different they approach the problem from a different angle I think this is personally the success of Pixar movies but try to kind of cannibalize that idea the Buffalo wasn't quite right this is so this gets really fun so then I thought okay if we were to take the idea that the end tips of Bob could start to have their own agency when the head of Bob was more dormant or asleep I thought oh what's make all the head all the little tips as if their agent flocking agents and so that they would flock with each other and this would of course ripple into the rest of its kind of armature into the ball spring physics model and create like pretty strange move things and ambulation so what's happening here is all the tips are trying to flock together but they're constrained by the physical connection they have with each other normally anything a flocking thing of all like a bunch of birds in each bird is like an independent unit but here it's kind of flocking against yourselves and immediately start to get kind of personalities like here's the sort of I don't know you can project a kind of caterpillar or like dragon in control I creature but then if you flip flip yeah when it flips here you get something more plant like such a simple inversion this is trying to test it actually touch something again just touch this really important I think weird shapes I don't know oh and see how it grows like here's like a great excursion it's the face right the face is super important because in a way that's our interface to how we relate to something as alien as a made-up creature and if this one side about this kind of head or face was to represent how we as human beings kind of like look upon a creature we always look at them we have we're just really tuned for faces Bob yes let's say about this like on one hands really cartoony and amusing and dumb but I kind of felt that like in the context when I have a container that contains so many things then like there was just no shame in doing something I don't know okay stretching Bob so Bob's elastic so what happens when you stretch it start to feel sorry for you I mean this is how off-tracking get a project like oh we have to model the underlying skeleton water buffalo man that can use in waste time in Manya okay so we're kind of getting there whoo okay trying to eat for the first time trying to throw something for the first time Bob Tran through the water buffalo friend just being I don't know evil you this is Bob self pruning it's like picking out every eyebrow I really wanted to make a creature whose underlying a you felt really intense like it had a personality like it wasn't when you think of like AI now conventional you think of maybe like Siri or Alexa we have this kind of neutral kind of concierge personality I really wanted an AI that had a really kind of extreme personality or that had some really kind of bad character is not bad but just kind of yeah bad characteristics that you could kind of come to love in a way it's called bag of beliefs and if it believed in something like like self pruning whatever that means that it could then sort of be that bad guy for you like Smaug the dragon is a dragon for you so you don't have to like it embody certain characteristics that you can just think oh it's like smog or it's like Bob it's just chasing his own tail so I guess I can show you a little bit of Bob oh I want to show you first a little bit how it's what I haven't shown you yet is how it's physically exhibited so this is at the serpentine in London so it's very beautiful exhibition space in the park so here's how Bob was initially shown which is that again this you know a lot of a I went into this but to say that it's a purely like an AI work or that I now an AI artist would be really sad and I think think about layers I think about like AI being sort of the plumbing but like I'm not a plumber I'm like I want to play with the water and so Bob is very much I tried to extend that metaphor to the installation so you feel that bob is a creature when you encounter it physically think force impressions matter and so when you walk into the serpentine what you see is something I hope would feel like the kind of like a reptile house or like an animal sanctuary and that it just takes a little suspension disbelief to feel that this AI creature this kind of artificial sentience has the same status as maybe a real creature would in real life and the special thing about this exhibition which I can't show you actually here is that it was there was a kind of component in which the viewer could use an iPhone X and actually Skype in a way Skype with Bob not skyping with Bob occurred on one of those skyping with Bob meant that you would literally possess one of these kind of heads that grew out of two Bob and Bob would perceive you as a human not as a human being but I was almost like that kid in the shining whose pinkie coat hears a voice and like that pinky comes alive so you're fully within Bob's world you're almost the spirit to Bob's kind of reality in that this was an essential part of the AI so that Bob could begin to have gained kind of kind of emotional data from you as a viewer and just to be very brief about the AI one aspect that I'm super proud of that we managed to do it's not mind-blowing but I think it's interesting is that Bob is that the sampling here's an example [Music] [Music] born rich um we want to say real quick and watch in the background bods AI is composed of those three layers I talked about in emissaries the previous work but in addition to that what Bob is doing about every 10 to 20 seconds is sampling maybe like 20 to 25 different parameters about its body its metabolism it's the time of the day it is currently locally here how old it is and during this kind of iPhone interaction the viewers face and each of these data points is pretty meaningless I would say individually but as a little mini collection it gets saved and then gets saved as a memory and that memory gets stored in this humongous it's called a KD tree and the KD tree is something that's like really quick to search and so whenever Bob as an action wants to feel something we thought really deeply we try to think deeply about what it means to feel something and I came to conclusion that feeling something isn't about feeling something in the moaning it's taking in all the similar data points that we have right now and comparing it to the closest memory we have that matches this of course the closest memory I have of Berkley was like 12 years ago and things have changed and I registered all those changes and if maybe I was like an unhappy undergraduate at the time all the changes are perceived now or I'm a happier person things seem to be getting better and Berkeley of course a super subjective and your frame of reference of what memory you choose to compare to the current moment completely colors what's better or what's worse and so Bob is constantly making this comparison we called the Delta the Delta between the current frame of reference and the closest memory that matches that situation maybe similar time of day maybe a person who's smiling and interacting and it's sunny today but what this allows is that judgment of whether things are better or worse is that Bob then associates all the other qualities Bob was doing of time let's say Bob was getting fed at the time so Bob Dean if it's judging this moment is worse it might inadvertently associate getting fed as something really negative and therefore how what kind of aversion to food almost like a traumatic memory of food and then therefore in the future be less inclined are attracted to food and over time here's a little bit I mean it's hard to visualize this stuff but this is the closest we can kind of see you can see it's each of these long lines it's like a recording of a moment and then some of these are the kind of feeling of it which is the judgment so it's about how do I say it's it's taking these deltas and things are changing its environment and then on top of that ideas that then bob has an attitude toward change so change is inevitable in Bob's environment but whether that change is good or bad is its attitude and what it judges as to what what to look out for what's getting bad forms a kind of personality over time sort of abstract to say all this but I think it kind of gets at the heart of feeling things like emotions or personality are really just really super convenient labels for us to talk about something I think it's much more horizontal and complex that's happening in our own mind we really tried to model this aspect of cognition at least in this project [Music] so during the exhibition Bob is manually fed by gallery assistants they're obviously something that can be automated but I have a dog of a little Corgi you know pisses me off so much it's really a feat but when I go feed him twice a day and my feet him I know you all love with something you have to feed it very and so I felt that again to create the sense that Jesus as a sentience it was important for the gallery attending through their day in day out watching the board of this pop character that they feed it and I think they say they love Bob now there's there's different kinds of food like that then can turn off and on different aspects of sub parts of the brain so we can keep watching this thanks for listening and I'm super happy to answer questions a little bit about ethics and empathy I think so so much of what we're confronted by in a simulated world are things that we don't empathize with or that you know we're killing or or doing other and and you've thought so beautifully about how to how to produce a very different kind of feeling and engagement with these creatures and yet we also therefore empathize with them and we see their suffering very differently and so how do you construct for yourself a sense of what's a little tactical in terms of the suffering of an object that doesn't exist but with with which we're investing a part of our own soul yeah I mean you know my gut feeling is when I'm making this thing is I'm so happy to torture it yeah completely happy and then knowing and thinking that this is a simulated creature but then when it comes to the moment where it's in the space it's physically in front of you and you feel sorry for like one time it's serpentine during their first weeks one bob completely pruned itself down to a little stub like a and you felt so sorry for it and at that phase in its life it just couldn't grow back yeah it's gonna scale anymore I don't know like I just kind of think that as with anything you as a human being you have to work and reminded of when you're a kid and you just like all your stuff the animals are constantly talking to you yeah it feels really real they just think in the very near future with artificial intelligence we're gonna have this kind of Shinto like spirit world where everything's just talking to us again in some way I can't help but feel empathy for our self-driving car the questions away a question here could you say a little about the sound in your work yeah the sound so Bob's voice first of all is really it's based on this one otter and it's butter called Nellie the talking otter this is famous otter who could talk and yeah I mean I wanted to find a voice that again that was had a kind of repose so had this kind of cuteness but then had a kind of ferocity and if Nellie Nellie is really [Music] I don't know why fight here Nellie has this kind of ferocity about cousin otter honors a really nasty creature essentially and then this other sounds are designed I worked at this really amazing sound designer called Jeremy yang he his day job is to design emotive sounds for self-driving cars and how to make a sound that like without human without English language can tell you like you across or something like this and I hired him precisely to kind of create a sound vocabulary for a bob where you meant to empathize or you meant to have a emotional reaction to it but it doesn't mean to speak English in order for you to feel as almost like when you drive really fast by like a couple having an argument you understand emotionality of your argument you mean you don't hear the English and so this was sort of the premise of the sound [Music] you don't really spit everything [Music] hi I was wondering if you could talk more about how you think through the personalities of your characters and specifically like what practices you use to understand like how Bob wants to exist in the world yeah I initially thought of these kind of archetypes and thought of its the whole other side of my procrastination making guides what was stuff I wanna talk about okay I started thinking about how Bob regards personality is physically expressive of its personality like its body language they also try to think about how Bob is internally at any given moment what mine said it's in I really I love this book called games people play it's by psychiatrist called Eric Byrne says people have all through life a child mindset of adult mindset and parent mindset and roughly a child is calm this sort of playful but irresponsible person inside you and then the parent is the one who just really doesn't want to spend any energy and just says this is the way things are coming as a way to very logically as a way to conserve energy but kind of is the inheritor of received mindsets and then there's adult mindset which is the kind of person side of you who is pretty soberly confronting a new reality or reality-competition about it like something simple is crossing Street you're not the child or the parent you're like really focused on the problem and that these three Minds Edyta forth these three mindsets form for me underlying model of Bob's like inner life and then Bob's outer life in terms of how its expressed in its body started become like those drawings I showed you earlier I mean gave them kind of names like Banzai Bob Starship Bob Bob Bob vegetable Bob but really what that means is sort of as an orientation toward it's an expression of its attitude toward its life so for example a bonsai Bob is evolved that's essentially in a way very close to a constant parent mind so it's a bob who wants to conserve energy is like you know I'm pretty mature but I would rather like settle down somewhere playing literally plant its roots and kind of become a tree I'm reminded of this there's a really strange sea creature it's like a mollusk I think that goes searching for a place to live and when it finally finds the perfect rock it sucks onto the rock and in order to sustain itself it has to literally consume its own brain and in consuming sprint incomes brain-dead but then it's like this happy blissful Banzai and then these other I mean these other archetypes here she can get into but yeah I tried to find this underlying model that has enough expressivity in it to model the personality hi hi and thank you so much that's great he always were really good at showing reality without pride and without shame exactly how it is and now it seems like you're giving these creatures a digital kind of emancipation and you just take them on their own terms but what happens when they get out when they get out of the cage of the frame of the screen yeah I mean they're kind of like you talk about zoos a lot and they're kind of like wild animals and that's wild animals we all have this condition that they're okay as long as they're in the cage but when they get out it's not so funny anymore so how would we deal with that same emancipation that you're celebrating in a way when they get out is it still good or is there a limit there I really believe we just got to try things until they go wrong and so in the case of something like Bob the hope is definitely that this is so much like the life cycle of a butterfly like this is like the pupae Bob there will be a caterpillar then there'll be a cocoon Bob and then there will be a butterfly Bob and for me the the next phase of this the kind of caterpillar Bob is maybe a bob that's on your mobile phone and you have a very littering mobile or direct relationship to it on a day-to-day level and then I can imagine a bob who having trained its life in this kind of simulation of virtual space becomes a kind of spirit that can possess the physical material for example like a bob that is possessing a house and then I can then imagine maybe a Bob who whose personality possesses something like a speedboat a little more like a something literally physically mobile and I don't know seems dangerous but fun I was curious how you reward or punish the the Bob or the other work the other the other beings that you were talking about earlier like when you talked about training them yeah what what are rewards or punishments for behavior it's not as exciting as the label sound this is really just numerical it's extremely just mathematical it's um in the case of the previous kind of worm creature is literally the reward was if it got to the other side of this obstacle avoided being bumped into it got like a gold star you know like it got a reward and then thus reinforced whatever there's a kind of neural net so the kind of weightings of those neurons so do you have to teach it in advance that a gold star is as good yeah so in the case of that creature I gave it enough I taught it in advance of actually displaying the work enough of how to get from point A to B but then once I start sharing the work and this for me is very beautiful property simulations that we can then as viewers sort of experience it continuing in China where so those rewards are still in place while I feel like when I was playing it just now it's just that then it allows for it to do some really bad behavior or some really erratic behavior and still learn and make that persistent do you have any desire to have your have Bob or any of them like respond to any visual or sorry viewer stimulus or have it like be connected to hardware yeah I mean currently it's limited to kind of the Skype in-your-face I was telling you about but yeah the the hope is that it can just kind of sense of space like it's kind of like bad where you would possess a part of Bob and then using the kind of facial recognition stuff built into the iPhone began to interpolate or understand or make good increasingly good guesses about what your emotional state was which then of course Bob would mirror and then that would reflect on its closest to that but the dream is to have it like really since and I guess this Skype response when you're installing the work if this piece perhaps learned or created memories through the serpentine audience if you reinstall this piece is it going to retain that or is it kind of gonna regenerate 100% it retains vu yeah that was the dream to have finally a an artwork that really started to be influenced by the viewer and almost like like setting Bob to like ten different boarding schools it's like it's boarding school start at serpentine and it will forever be inflected by British people this sort of abstract way but nonetheless and all that data gets saved we don't I mean it's a little dangerous like but we don't erase any of the memory so like all that just the file just really really big you [Applause] you

Channel: Berkeley Arts + Design

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Id: A7918yXhgVI

Length: 83min 2sec (4982 seconds)

Published: Mon May 14 2018