One of the most beautiful books I've
ever read was a book called, "Impro" by Keith Johnstone. And he's a British theatre teacher who tried to create a kind of rule book for how to treat the theatre as a safe space for you to recolonize, in a way, the right side of
your brain. The part of your brain that, according to him, gets taken away when you're expected to show up to places on-time, or have a factual understanding of the world. He has this very funny exercise where you point out an object, and you give it a new name out loud. "Chicken! Telescope!
Daniel! Rock!" And as an adult, you realize that's super hard. I can point at this table, and I'm thinking
"table, table, table," but he says, when you try the same experiment with a child, they have no fixed model for the table. "Table" is like as good as "water bottle," "Mars," "toilet." The whole premise of his improv strategy is that that part of you, is
still inside you somewhere it's stuck inside you. It's the part that comes out when you dream, it's the part that comes out when you're not anxious, when you're
relaxed, when you're in the moment of things. And he uses improv, in a way, as the scaffolding or the structure of the portal to get you to that mental state again. I've been really influenced by this because it presents a model of the mind that has multiple agents encompassed in one body, and have them flicker between these different ways of being. My very first works were animated videos,
but I felt that seeing a beginning, middle, and end had its limits in describing the behavior of a character. Now, Walt Disney or Miyazaki has the benefit that their characters are so
larger-than-life, that keep growing like the way your cousin keeps growing or your dog keeps growing. But within a discrete artwork, to capture that expansiveness of a person is really hard. I felt that a simulation could be a
form where there was no beginning or end. Simulation, for me, is like a video game
that plays itself. Unlike a film or video, or even an animation, where you forever commit a character to how you drew and how you animated it. This thing can animate itself, and given enough environmental stimulus--which I do by
creating a virtual ecosystem for these agents and other agents--it can adapt and
change its own behavior, or not. As happens in life. I feel like the earlier simulations are really focused on trying to create a world, but more and more, I find that, for me, it's been more focusing and interesting to try to create a mind, to try to model artificial intelligence or mind that is resilient enough to be kicked out of one world and dropped into another is an analogy I
think to our own ability to accommodate and tolerate really indeterminate situations that we find ourselves in all the time. The simulation, "Emissary in the
Squad of Gods," I tried to simulate an ancient community, facing a threat for the first time. And it's based loosely on the work of
the psychiatrist Julian Jaynes, who had a very controversial hypothesis in the 70s, that ancient people weren't conscious. You and I hear an internal voice, and we
perceive it to be a voice that comes from us, but he hypothesizes that ancient
people perceived that voice to be the hallucination of other people, or other voices emanating inside you, to make decisions. I love this idea that there's a metaphorical congress inside you. There's the Ian that wants to
retreat from all change in the world. There's the Ian that's supposed to be working right now, but's procrastinating. There's the Ian who hopes that everything
I say is going to be meaningful. But then, if I can see this moment as an opportunity, it can be a kind of portal into really tolerating this uncertainty, this ambiguity, this weirdness, and perhaps even surf it. Or, learn to in a way, love it. And if I can do that, whether that's some forms of self-help, or whether that's through art, this is the most exciting Ian. In my most relaxed and lucid moments, I feel that certain people in that
congress deserve are more voice than others, and I'm trying to cultivate that.
