Still from Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, Ian Cheng, 2021. Real-time live animation, 48 min, color, sound.

A Coefficient of Luck
Ian Cheng in conversation with Alex Zafiris

Speaking to the artist Ian Cheng, you encounter his love for polarity: He explains how his 2019 artwork BOB (Bag of Beliefs), a sinewy autonomous creature programmed by artificial intelligence, faces trauma from its choices. He describes the courage that lurks deep in our worst nightmares; his joy of epic, cinematic dramas set in unremarkable suburbs; and the pleasure of seeing sweet children unafraid of—in love with!—huge scary monsters. Optimism reigns over these tensions, ushering in a kind of benevolence to chaos that, much like striking a match in a pitch black unconsciousness, invites us to uncover blind spots and open up space for alternate neural pathways.

His output increasingly contextualizes these extremes in a hyper-technological realm. In 2017, the MoMA acquired Emissaries, a trilogy of large-scale installations, and exhibited them at PS1. Each 10 foot-tall screen projected live simulations set in time zones thousands of years apart, beginning with the dawn of consciousness to the furthest-flung ideation of AI sentience. The enigmatic, puzzling cast of characters are programmed by Cheng to perform, or live, independently into infinity. They fade in and out of our recognition, with an all-seeing eye grazing the vast terrain to locate the lone emissary—a child, a Shiba Inu dog, a puddle—that drives these re-contoured narratives. Created using the game engine Unity, the effect is choppy, illusory. Figures loom and flicker, voices falter and vibrate, a low wind blows, shadows go long. There is a feeling of presence and emerging rhythms. Story is a moving target, pushing for a re-centering of logic and rationality. Cheng describes this as “a video game that plays itself,” which is an intentionally apt, mirror description of our reality. We are constantly trying to decode, create order, and find meaning. Watching Emissaries gently brings those instincts to the fore. He asks: How do our minds evolve? How do we accept change? What creates meaning?

Cheng graduated from UC Berkeley in 2006 with a double major in Cognitive Science and Art Practice. His first job was at Industrial Light & Magic, the special effects division of LucasFilm, founded by George Lucas to produce Star Wars. He then went back to school to complete an MFA at Columbia, graduating in 2009. He began showing work in 2011, and has since had solo presentations at the Serpentine Galleries, the Migros Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, and the Julia Stoschek Collection; and has been included in group presentations at the Venice Biennale, the Moderna Museet, the MOCA, the Whitney Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum, the Fondation Louis Vuitton, among others. He is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York, Pilar Corrias in London, and Standard in Oslo. He now works with a team under his company Metis Suns, led by producer Veronica So, and his impulse for collaboration extends to his audience via interactive apps, wikis, a book on worlding literacy, and in-gallery participation. He lives in New York with his wife, the artist Rachel Rose, their two children, and a corgi.

His most recent work, Life After BOB, first premiered at LUMA Foundation in Arles, then at The Shed in New York last year; it is currently showing at Light Art Space in Berlin. Also built using Unity, it is an anime series composed of real-time simulations, each programmed to adhere to a traditional filmic structure. Featured was the 48-minute first episode, “The Chalice Study” set in a not too-far future, centering around a ten-year-old girl, Chalice. Her father, the ambitious neural engineer Dr. Wong, has implanted a powerful, experimental AI named BOB into her nervous system, designed to support and steer Chalice through life with greater potential and ease. Realizing that she can outsource the greater discomforts of daily existence to BOB, Chalice avoids hardship and strain. Soon, her AI is performing Chalice far better than she can, and this is the side of her that wins her father’s adoration. When human Chalice awakens to this realization, she faces one of our biggest conflicts: Confrontation with the self. Who is she, really? How much time has slipped away? How does she choose a path? What forces, seen or unseen, are at play?

Emissary In The Squat Of Gods, Ian Cheng, 2015. Live simulation and story, infinite duration.
Image courtesy of the artist, Pilar Corrias, Gladstone Gallery, Standard (Oslo).

Alex Zafiris: Emissaries at MoMA PS1 was my first experience of your work. I was at the Printed Matter book fair. It was packed, and I was looking at all the books obsessively. I went upstairs and wandered into the exhibition space and was completely taken in. It was such a break from everything. I felt an extreme calm, watching. And I felt very free, from the chaos and anxieties of my mind. That feeling really stayed with me. I developed a connection to your work that day. How do you design emotion, in these worlds?

Ian Cheng: First of all, I’m happy to hear that the two things you felt were calm and free. The development of an emotional connection with the viewer is the primary thing any artist would hope to achieve. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I started making simulations. How do I make a work feel alive for a viewer, without having to use people or animals? How do I compress and play with the electricity of life, the unpredictability of life?

Over the years, I’ve realized that the art I really love, and aspire to always make, speaks in some language of the unconscious, which is inherently an emotional language. Dreams are so emotional. That’s the energy source. When you dream, all the rational circuitry in your brain is asleep. The remaining active part of your brain is working out something unresolved, in the medium of dream-space. For me, it’s the most courageous and curious part of a person’s mind. It wants to grope at an answer to problems that are unsolvable by the rational, conscious, wake brain. Your dreams are the first line of offense in sense-making. The answers come out hyperbolic, overly symbolic, exaggerated. It’s also the part of you that is capable of generating the darkest images. But the quality of the answer doesn’t matter: It’s the bravery of that part of your cognitive processing that even attempts to look at something unknown, scary, chaotic, and tries to make sense of it.

Your rational brain wants to use its maps, beliefs, and pre-existing stories. But those things might all be outdated for the problem at hand. As an artist, I want to mimic the language of a dream as a way to bridge things that are beyond us—too complex, too strange, moving too fast—for our current way of thinking, upbringing, and how we negotiate the world. Why? Because a dream language is the only one we permit, and even enjoy, to voluntarily confront the unknown and dwell in it. It’s de facto the artist’s job to powerfully integrate dream language into waking material reality.

For the PS1 show, I made a fuss about having deep archways, rather than just normal doorways. The curator and I both agreed that this produced a portal effect, a feeling that you’re entering another world; that you’re dropping into an unconscious space. We were very concerned with trying to create an architectural transition to approach the actual works, to help elicit a neuro-bridge with the viewer. Art is the domain in culture that positively prides itself in using an unconscious language as a source of nourishment. Advertising and mass entertainment use it too, of course, but for instrumental ends.

I want to mimic the language of a dream as a way to bridge things that are beyond us—too complex, too strange, moving too fast.︎I want to mimic the language of a dream as a way to bridge things that are beyond us—too complex, too strange, moving too fast.︎

AZ: I didn’t expect you to talk about dreams and the unconscious. I know that you have a background in cognitive science. I read that during your studies, you changed direction, because you felt that you could apply much more of that thinking in art.

IC: That’s true. I thought: Art is a place where you can choose your own problems. In other domains, you’re addressing a very specific problem, one often defined by pre-existing obligations, people, or processes. You try to find creative solutions, but it’s tough to back up and redefine it. Art is still very free in this respect. The art world can be stifling in some ways, but it’s still premised on artists having permission to explore problems that they want. We live in fraught cultural times, but I think that permission is inherently there. More than ever, I crave art that has the nerve to explore scary, complex, impossible problems, and the imagination to throw some answers at them.

AZ: You are moving more and more towards narrative in your work. Did you consider serendipity, chance, destiny, or fate, say with BOB: Bag of Beliefs? In Life After BOB, the protagonist Chalice is on a mission, which requires an arc, and a character profile.

IC: Yes, absolutely. BOB was a virtual creature; it was an opportunity for me to really dive deeply into ideas of artificial life. The current landscape of AI is dominated by deep learning models that all try to solve a domain or a game, like the game of trying to label images, or the game of generating sensible text. But BOB was a way for me to explore an embodied AI—albeit a virtual body—which presents a whole other set of AI problems. An embodied AI requires a way to unify its sensing of an unstructured environment with its working beliefs. It also requires motivations to help narrow the open-ended, continuous problem of how to act, and what to do with itself. In order to perpetuate itself, it needs the ability to perceive the world as opportunities for action, not as a landscape of platonic, objective objects.

BOB (Bag of Beliefs), Ian Cheng, 2019. Artificial life form.

When I began making BOB, I had to really consider the edges of BOB’s life as a work, and as a virtual creature. How it’s born, how it dies, what its life journey is. What I learned in developing the AI of BOB is that early experiences at the beginning of its life crystallized certain foundational beliefs. For instance, what things in its environment meant had to be boiled down to: Does an object present an opportunity for action for pain or pleasure on BOB’s body? There’s truth to this. Pain is the most real thing from an organism’s point of view. If you’re in deep pain, you can’t escape it. That’s your total experience, you can’t deny its reality in any way. BOB’s AI takes unstructured sensory information from its environment and tries to generalize a belief out of that. For example: After it’s born, if it sees what you and I perceive as an apple, it will instead just see a red shiny object. Maybe it will go and investigate it. Maybe it’ll put it near its mouth, and maybe it’ll bite into it. It tastes good, and gives energy. Now it has a belief about red shiny objects: Tastes good and gives energy. Therefore, the next red shiny object encounter is going to generate that same belief. It’s a very action-oriented sense of meaning.

The next object it encounters might be, to you and me, a red brick. But BOB’s stupid, the way babies are very stupid. BOB will bite into that brick, thinking it’s an apple, because that’s the only belief it has: it’s red, and shiny. Then, of course, BOB will be in severe pain, its teeth will crack, it will have indigestion, maybe it will throw up. And now it must develop a new belief because of that negative emotion. This red shiny thing—that is more square-like, cubic—is horrible. It’s death. It’s super pain. BOB now has to develop a belief to augment the original belief of red shiny objects being tasty and energizing. Over time, it develops a stack of beliefs that are nested within each other. No other forces are intervening yet, and it is left to its own beliefs. BOB’s worldview is limited to a string of early childhood experiences. What BOB comes to believe about those experiences shapes all its behavior going forward in its life. Which you could say is a form of destiny, or a kind of curse of your own beliefs.

What I learned is that BOB would basically believe itself into a corner, become rigid and brittle, and often die. So I made an interactive app called “BOB Shrine,” where you can make offerings to BOB in the form of different virtual objects. You can attach a caption, using your parental wisdom (or, parental sadism!), to override BOB’s initial beliefs about whatever it is presented with, and encourage it try something beyond its worldview. This was how I was able to get BOB to learn beyond the limitations of its initial childhood experiences. It was a way of reshaping BOB’s life course. Another word for life course, you might say, is destiny.

I learned a lot about animal psychology in doing BOB, but I think it extrapolates pretty similarly to human beings. I became obsessed with the idea of people’s destiny. The psychiatrist Eric Berne had this idea that everyone has a life script. This script is a way of organizing yourself in time, at the scale of a lifetime. Berne’s hypothesis was that, whether you consciously want it or not, everyone has a premonition about their life—whether or not you’ll get married, have children, be successful at a job, or be a perpetual failure. He asked, for example: Do you sense that you are prone to repeat failures over and over? Or do you persevere through difficulty, and level up in some way? Will you die with friends around you? Or will you die alone? These are existential questions. Berne described that, if you ask someone to stage a play of their life, and how they imagine it will go—not how they want it to go, but how they think it will go, how it’s destined to go—everyone can conjure that play. For many people, the play they imagine is often a tragedy, with flaws that they would not like to look at. Berne’s idea is that you develop a life script very young, based on parental modeling and early childhood experiences. Then you unconsciously go about enacting that script, especially at major forks in the road. One purpose of Transactional Analysis—Berne’s school of psychotherapy—is to become conscious of your life script, because then you can choose to rewrite it.

Carl Jung is a big inspiration for me. He said something very similar: “Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be.” I came across this quote when I was writing Life After BOB. It’s very similar to Berne’s notion of life scripts. The first episode of Life After BOB is called “The Chalice Study,” and it’s about life scripts in a post-AI world. The title Life After BOB is shorthand for Life Scripts after AI. The main character, Chalice, is a ten-year-old girl. Her neural engineer father, Dr. Wong, gives her an AI called BOB to help co-parent her and guide her through childhood towards an idea of a satisfying existence. Chalice, being a ten-year-old, has an escapist, lazy, weak personality with a disposition to evade life and drift into fantasy. She abdicates more and more responsibility to BOB to deal with her conflicts. Like arguing and negotiating with her dad, or just walking up a flight of stairs because she doesn’t want to deal with the physical pain of it. BOB takes over her nervous system and drones her—possesses her—and does her life for her. Over time, her father falls more and more in love with the BOB side of Chalice. The human side of Chalice becomes increasingly jealous. It’s a Cain and Abel story, in a way.

Still from Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, Ian Cheng, 2021. Real-time live animation, 48 min, color, sound.

At the height of the Dr. Wong/BOB dynamic, the human Chalice rebels and goes off and plays a neural game, like a kid sulking off to the basement to play video games and never coming back. What feels like 10 seconds in this neural game is actually 10 years in her real life. BOB has lived out her teenage years, from ages ten to 20 embodied as her, doing her life for her. By embodying Chalice for ten years, BOB has effectively become a real person (who renamed herself Chyna). So, the human side of Chalice—that human consciousness—sits outside of herself, seeing a version of her adult self that she does not recognize. It’s not who she imagined she’d become. It’s very upsetting. She hates the life that BOB has lived for her. So the core problem of the story is: Does Chalice reject this life that BOB has created and built for her? Is it merely a case of AI gone wild? After all, Chalice did not have any agency in this life that BOB created without her input for ten years. Or: Does Chalice integrate some part of what BOB did, even if it upsets her expectations? Because an AI living in your nervous system leaves behind—over the course of its experiences—all this muscle memory. Even if you wipe out all the episodic memory, there is still evidence of a life lived, in your posture, in your reactions. Chalice has to decide whether or not to integrate some of that. She has to accept that part of her story is: She went away, BOB did her life for her, she returned, and had to deal with putting herself back together into someone coherent. It’s an attempt at defining a new archetype. A person who lives with unearned life experience. A person who inherits unhuman experience, now baked into her nervous system and body.

AZ: I want to know about the aesthetics of the project. Last year you posted a picture of Chalice on your Instagram, and I was instantly drawn to her. She felt real to me. Your style is very specific.

IC: Thanks for saying that. Forget all these psychological ideas! I do obsess over how everything looks. I’m trying to find some new balance between East and West. I love Western animation. I’ll see every Disney and Pixar movie. I grew up on Disney. On the other hand, I also love anime. It’s deliberately cute, chibi, but it is often pitched towards an adult audience, with dark existential subject matter. I love this duality in anime. I always wanted to find a more international blending of those two. The look of Life after BOB leans more on the side of anime. But it’s also made in a video game engine, which has its own visual language concerned with polygonal economy.

AZ: The depiction of emotion on her face was very immediate to me. She’s so expressive. Do you sketch these out, first? What’s that process?

IC: I started by making a 16-page comic, to really understand and articulate how the characters and world would appear. How Chalice looks is rooted in her personality. I’m really into the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It’s a personality typology system, inspired by Carl Jung and developed by Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers, a mother and daughter duo, during World War II. People think of it as a rational person’s astrology, and there’s some truth to that. When it works, it really works. MBTI was a useful way to define the different characters, and have a spread of personality types across the project. Chalice was typed as INFP: Introverted, Intuition, Feeling, and Perception.

It’s a particular personality that I have a fascination with. It’s someone who is empathic and capable of healing, yet almost selfish and severe about protecting their values. At their worst, a degenerate INFP can be aimless and non-committal, and evade any specific agency in shaping their own life path for fear of limiting themselves from other possibilities. I wanted to start Chalice at this degenerate INFP state. She was designed and written with this in mind.

Then it was simply an iterative process, trying to describe to my animators who this person was. I wrote and rewrote a 48-page script, rewrote it again. I made mood boards and drawings. We had a very compressed production schedule. It was “do or die,” like, are we going to capture her character, or not? We only had a schedule and budget for one or two revision passes. However, there are only so many Chalice moments of facial expression and body movement in the film that we get a good look at, and they have to add up to a coherent profile. The vocal performance, and the words she’s saying, helped. And obviously me, micromanaging from all angles, about who this character is. I think the animators nailed it. I can see a specific person in Chalice.

Concept art for Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021.

Concept art for Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021.

AZ: When you mentioned “aliveness,” I wondered if teamwork can more often produce a more universal feeling than a work that is made by one person. It’s a different synergy. You have several collaborators, and you work closely with a producer, Veronica So.

IC: Yes. Veronica is the first person who reads everything. She’s who I trust to gut check: Does this feel right? Does this feel true? Does this motivation add up? Is what I’m doing what I truly want to be doing? Is it in touch with its most elemental core? Is it manifesting into something legible to a viewer? Are we both excited?

AZ: It’s your work, and you are running the team, but you’re not, say, a lone painter. You are a collaborator.

IC: Right. Recently, I came across an etymology of the word “world” as: “That which nourishes you.” My mind created an image of a water stream, cutting through darkness. The water grows and grows into a stable, continuous flowing river. Soon, new plant life begins to sprout around it. Animals are drawn to inhabit its banks. Eventually the dramas of the plant and animal life become the attraction, and the flowing river is just the backdrop. This river image led me to a more precise definition of “world”: A world is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game. Often, when you think of a “world” you think of like, Middle Earth in Lord of The Rings. A geographically coherent territory, and all the drama that occurs between physically adjacent kingdoms. But today, a world is much more the network that forms around a non-physical game. In the case of Life After BOB, the game evolved into: Make an animated film using the Unity game engine remotely during COVID-19. Week to week, it was this game of chipping away at a cascading to-do list on the production timeline. Professionally, everyone had their production role and a north star to focus on. But I’ll never forget the basic feeling of being in Zoom rooms with twenty-plus people every Monday for a year, and all the one-on-one Zoom work sessions throughout the week. What made lockdown tolerable was getting to inhabit this shared world, this web of relationships that started from a specific game that I made up.

A world is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game.︎A world is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game.︎

AZ: Speaking of being in dialogue, so far you have referenced psychiatrists—Carl Jung and Eric Berne. Who else?

IC: I’m inspired a lot by film. I grew up in Los Angeles, and my mom would take me movie-hopping on the weekend when I was a kid. I’d see five or six movies sometimes on a Saturday. We would start in the morning, and then go until the night. I’m definitely a creature of narrative. I’ve seen a lot of movies. I have a lot of random IMDb knowledge. It’s something that’s in me, even though I’m not in Hollywood. I’m super inspired by Hayao Miyazaki. More so than ever now, because my daughter loves My Neighbor Totoro. I’ve seen it, like, 40 times in the last 30 days. It’s actually really cool to see it so many times. You start to see what wears on you, what really stays with you, and different things emerge. I didn’t realize until recently that the film starts off as a genre story about a haunted house. These two kids and their dad move into a new house in the countryside, and they’re preparing it for their mom, who has been in hospital for months, sick with some kind of bronchial problem. She needs the country air to rehabilitate. The neighborhood kid comes by and says, “Your house is haunted!” Miyazaki’s premise is that ghosts are real! But they’re not scary ghosts, they’re friendly ghosts. Spirits aren’t a bad thing in Japan, and only children can see and delight in them. This was such a beautiful spin. Totoro is a fat ghost or a spirit who can help you when you need it most, but least expect it. My daughter is two years old and enchanted by it. She makes me fast forward to when Totoro arrives.

AZ: I remember being non-judgmental about things like ghosts and monsters until I was told to be scared of them.

IC: Yes. I love how specific Miyazaki is about a character’s age and their psychology at that age. Each life stage has stupidities, but it also has superpowers. He has empathy for the perspective of children, and how they specifically see the world at that age. You never feel like it’s a movie pandering an idea of children. It’s a movie about being a child, with the range of emotional and psychological experience that a child might have. He doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to scary stuff. He will do things that should scare a child, such as a mom being sick. You don’t know if she’s ever going to come home. Maybe she never comes home. That’s so much scarier.

AZ: Terrifying.

IC: I also love the filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson, because he has an alive, demonic exuberance, but it’s often applied to a very particular mundane place: The San Fernando Valley, which is where I grew up. He said he wanted to make the three-hour-long movie Magnolia as an epic for the San Fernando Valley. There are New York epics, Roman epics, but why not an epic about the little suburb that you’re from? Magnolia says to me that transcendent human drama can come from anywhere, even the Valley! I remember going to see it on opening weekend. I recognized all the locations: That’s the gas station my dad goes to, that’s the donut shop we go to, that’s Ventura Boulevard we took to go to school. Everything felt specific to my home, but heightened with crazy operatic energy. I felt so proud.

AZ: Did your parents see it?

IC: They did. They thought, Oh, this is so dark.

AZ: I knew it!

IC: They were like, This is so melodramatic. These people are crazy. That’s not like us. Asians would not act that way. And you know, there’s some truth to that, sure. Magnolia is showbiz-adjacent white drama, specific to Anderson’s own upbringing, on a content level. But the alchemy of his big art filmmaking energy—with the smallness of the San Fernando Valley—is such a vital and funny combo. I’m attracted to his instinct to present an impasse in an everyday small drama, and then elevate it (raining frogs?!) to get through it. It’s the same attraction I have to Miyazaki’s Totoro. Siblings coping with their mom being away sick, which then necessitates a fantastical fat spirit to manifest in their life. It’s a tension that connects the concrete to the transcendent. That’s just good art!

AZ: What about VR? Does it interest you?

IC: Hmm. I think there will be a day when VR will truly interest me. The words “virtual reality” are unrealized. Philip K. Dick said, “Reality is that which, even when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” What he meant is that reality is all the chaotic, unprocessed things that you don’t want to see, or that you don’t have the perspective or map to even perceive. But it’s there, and eventually, you either have to confront it and make sense of it, or you die. That’s a hardcore definition of reality. Carl Jung said: “In the filth, it will be found.” He meant something quite similar. Where you’re most scared to look is where you’ll find the creative answers for how to deal with your troubles. Only then can you begin to overcome these troubles, and exercise the vital process of integrating the darkness of reality into yourself. So, when I hear “virtual reality,” I think: I don’t love it quite yet. But I will, the day that it can start to produce unexpected filth—if you see what I mean?

AZ: Yes!

IC: When VR or VR interfaces can start to self-generate enough chaos, unknown-ness, and weird social relations that don’t have any prior mapping—and be a space where you can reliably tap into that hellish complexity, as scary as that might be—Oh yeah, then I’ll be very interested in VR. And I think that day is coming. I think we can artificially produce filth.

Carl Jung said: “In the filth, it will be found.”︎Carl Jung said: “In the filth, it will be found.”︎

AZ: Speaking of darkness. People generally associate very generous feelings towards serendipity. But there is also the inevitable, which links to what you were saying about life scripts. You can find yourself sliding towards an awful thing happening. Others in this issue of Maquette argue that there is no such thing as serendipity, or randomness. It’s a very individual feeling, rather than a phenomenon. I think that serendipity can be quite creepy. Twin Peaks by David Lynch would be an example of worldbuilding with obscure systems related to the unconscious and dreams. Many of which are dark, although, always related to love. The viewers notice patterns, coincidences, and form their own narrative responses.

IC: Serendipity makes me think of luck. There are so many seemingly random or unexpected things happening in the world, and trickling down into our personal lives. Who knows when you might get COVID-19 again, and can’t catch a plane because of some new regulation. Little things just spiral out of control and snowball. But then, what luck—maybe it spirals in a way where you get to spend an unexpected time at home with your kids.

AZ: Exactly.

IC: I keep thinking that, in a world characterized as out of control and filled with so much unmanageable change, of course we would turn to ideas of serendipity and luck as orienting forces. Because you can’t count on intelligence, hard work, wealth, status, or power to actually steer the long-term future anymore. Everyone is humbled. People used to make five-to-ten-year plans. I don’t think anyone does anymore. Our information stream of world events, and how things are changing, and how accelerated technology is, is overwhelming. Nothing we could previously really count on can still be thought of as failsafe strengths. They are necessary, but not sufficient. It seems that you still need a coefficient of luck, to make it through life. I think of luck as an attractor, like a mathematical attractor. You can start to compound your sense of luck by moving in the direction of something with potential, even if it is still taking shape. The writer Venkatesh Rao sometimes writes about the possibility of a new temporal science, on how to steer into the unfolding future and increase your coefficient of luck.

I have two kids. A two-year-old daughter, and a one-year-old son. In a basic way, I have to make sure that my kids learn how to be strong and resilient amidst change. But I also think: How can I help them generate the most luck in their life? Luck is a very Chinese, superstitious framing. Another way to think of it is: How do I encourage them to move toward the unknown? There’s just more opportunity in the unknown. When I imagine them asking me, What should I do when I grow up? I’d want to encourage them to move in the direction of a frontier, a place that feels vital to the future, but is not yet crowded by pre-existing maps, prejudices, and competition. A frontier is risky, but it is also a zone of compounding luck. So when you ask about luck, I definitely think it’s real. Luck might not be a force of physics, but it is a quality found in a person. It is a metric of their orienting strategy towards the unfolding, unknown future. If you’re a parent, you want this quality for your kids. I want to cultivate luckiness in my kids as much as I want them to learn to read, to be in their body, to socialize, and to have a flexible palette. Maybe luckiness is the quality that emerges from the fit between living on some scary, un-systematized frontier and still managing to have courage, stay curious, and be in touch with yourself.

Still from Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, Ian Cheng, 2021. Real-time live animation, 48 min, color, sound.

For more information on Ian Cheng, visit his site.

Alex Zafiris is CCAM’s writer-in-residence, and the editor of Maquette. As a writer she has contributed to Bomb,The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Mixte (Paris), Observer, and Nowness; as an editor, she has worked at Romance Journal, Guernica, Immaterial, Osmos, Tokion, Paper, and the United Nations. For more information, visit her site.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 1 of 8.

New broadband capacities from fiber optic cable in populous countries like Kenya serve a skyrocketing number of cell phones making digital telecommunications more robust. But spatial information systems are more robust when people access each other and multiply their exchanges. In Kenya the urban vessels that accompany digital technologies are often large highways or zone enclaves that decrease exchanges, inflate the distances between people or make cities with the topology of a closed loop. While roads are typically regarded as conduits of progress and opportunity, in rural or wilderness areas, it might be more productive to dial down roads when dialing up broadband. Shrinking roads means preserving farm and wilderness while attracting the global networks of tourism and university research. One can then hack a telecommunications network by changing a road as well as changing a bit of code.

Active Infinitive
Dana Karwas in conversation with Keller Easterling

I love orchestrating surprises. It’s a form of time travel: I’m creating a piece of the future that I’m a part of, but which is unleashed and accessed by others.

Many years ago, I briefly worked as a temp doing architectural drafting in New York City. I was given the task of updating redlines for a Las Vegas casino project. I confidently pretended to understand the firm's specific line-weight file, while slowly coming to the realization that I was a fully-fledged CAD specialist—pushing lines with a mouse, cutting them, splicing, adding weights, notating, repeat. It was a vacuum of creativity, especially for the under-skilled and pretentious architecture grad I was at the time.

A few days into this project, I moved onto the private gambling room, which was located above the larger, maze-like public slots area. This was meant for the high rollers and whales. It had a bar, varying levels, wood paneling, and an enormous gambling table at the center.

After weeks of staring at the representation of this room as a series of lines and perspectives, the absurd theatricality of it possessed me. I saw an architectural potential in the drawings. What if a person suddenly found the need to escape a bad situation? Perhaps they had made a series of Very Bad Decisions, or found themselves in a Dead-End Job. Using perfect line-weights, I made a notation for a trapdoor into the space under the table. I then went into the reflected ceiling plan of the floor below in a different drawing, and similarly notated it there, called it out, and gave it dimensions to fit an adult human. It was perfectly spec-ed onto the drawing. The sense of control this gave me—of future opportunity and chaos—was thrilling.

The next day, I made my own exit from the firm.

I’ve never visited the casino, but I sometimes wonder if the trapdoor made it into the final blueprints—inadvertently slipping through the final engineering review by people not thinking to notice such a thing might be there, or maybe consciously included by a designer, delighted to find such a surprise.

Throughout my studies and in developing my arts practice, Keller Easterling has been a constant reference and great source of inspiration. She has a specific way of bringing architecture into visibility from various fields of information, and implants spatial form/s into the imagination through her writing. Her work has entered the mainstream through a range of disciplines; from performance, or a set of instructions, even a laser disk!

Many know her as an architect, writer, and as the Enid Dwyer Professor and Director of the Master of Environmental Design (MED) Program at the Yale School of Architecture. However, it should also be known that she possesses the profound gift of idea generation for anyone who encounters her work. Her important and critical voice in the field allows us to see something recognizable as architecture that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Expecting nothing, I asked her to participate in this issue. When she said yes, I toted around her books (Medium Design: Knowing how to work on the world and Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space), sputtering her quotes to my students like a broken robot—

On latent space in design: How do you represent an instruction that will play out in time?

On new technologies replacing the old: It is a closed loop establishing a new smart that, by definition, recreates the old dumb.

After finishing my reread of Medium Design, I was overwhelmed with ideas. Hundreds of trapdoors were waiting to open! I had long forgotten about my casino trapdoor. Easterling’s writing released the memory, opening the latent space of the act. She also showed me how to describe the act of designing something for a body to move through in the future.

For our dialogue, I immediately turned to cinema. I realized that we shared a sentiment for an architecture that is driven by human scenarios; and also, a shared suspicion for the complacency of (monolithic) forms driving architectural discipline. Thinking on this issue’s theme, I became obsessed with a small moment from Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Playtime, in which architecture informs the action of the scene: A group of tourists sit on a bus. Adjacent to it is a modern office building. A window-washer is cleaning a large window, onto which the tourists and their bus is reflected. Suddenly, he rotates the window to open it, and the reflection of the bus tilts; the tourists scream in delight, as though in their reality, their bus had tilted along with the window.

This intersection of movement and a window reflection driving a narrative fascinated me, so I asked Easterling to watch the film again before we spoke. Our discussion exceeded all my hopes—not only does our style of thinking overlap (notably, a shared critique of the suburbs!), but her approach to activating forms reminded me of all the inherent possibilities of architecture also as art; how film can show different spaces; and architecture as an interdisciplinary practice, a community, a tool for emotion, and connection.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 2 of 8.

Dana Karwas: Did you re-watch Playtime?

Keller Easterling: It’s just so charming and “alive.” Jacques Tati is attuned to the interactivity between things. Objects in space, some of them non-human and inorganic, are performing something in relation to each other. The bus window, the camera, the people, the tilting glass all have a repertoire of activities that can be in interplay. And he’s just watching it dance.

DK: I love that. It’s like listening to jazz. My young son laughs through the whole movie. Children like repetition. Every time we watch it, he will see something new: A surprise repetition loop. It makes me think of the opening that is being created for the viewer. That window scene struck me as a gateway to something else, an in-between space; what that could be, with the play of the camera. He loves the fake doorknob. We look for it in the restaurant shots: The glass door breaks, and then they keep holding the doorknob up, and opening and closing the door. I think of the body in action, a kind of embodiment of an architectural space that does not exist in mimicry.

I also think of selective attention⁠—what we are paying attention to. Playtime is like the feature film version of the invisible gorilla experiment in psychology. There’s a group of people in a room throwing a basketball between each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times they pass it. Halfway through, a person in a gorilla costume walks by, pounding its chest. The subjects are then asked if they saw the gorilla, and half the time, hardly anyone saw it. When they watch the video again, everyone is shocked. I am very interested in our intuition around visibility. What are these spaces and objects highlighting? What are the connections right in front of us, that we might not necessarily see?

I was struck by your insight of these relative potentials between things that unfold over time. It reminded me of the theater, and the way that we stumble into serendipitous discovery, and how this can be spatially cultivated. And I’m wondering, in terms of connecting spatial culture: Is there a way to cultivate latent space?

KE: When you mentioned that we would be talking about serendipity, it raised many questions. On the one hand, you think of something serendipitous as being related to chance, but maybe that’s not why it’s so startling, or so funny. Maybe serendipity is the thrill of being aware of the potentials within a context, the way in which the arrangement makes some things possible, and some things impossible. There is already a dance between things. A tilting window is at a height that interrupts a range of vision. A finger can thread through the handle of a teacup. The height of a chair corresponds to where a knee bends, and it all fits under a table.

The psychologist James J. Gibson calls these potentials “affordances” that are in an ecology of interplay. So, while something serendipitous is not designed (you used the word cultivated, which is nice), you can put things together in different chemistries that have potentials. You can put Na+ and Cl- next to each other, and you might get salt. A designer is not just designing fixed objects and controlling them with geometry in a rigid aesthetic regime. Designing might just simply be entangling things that have the potential to combine, or nudging things into a richer entanglement.

Most good designers think this way. They are good at mixtures. They’re good at seeing what kinds of things mix, and how they mix; and their potentials for a serendipity that is maybe not so surprising after all.

There is already a dance between things.︎There is already a dance between things.︎

DK: I keep thinking about the body in the play of this as well. I read about your idea of canines, of designers being able to think like a dog, and thinking about our canine ability to identify a situation or a pattern. The theme for this issue took inspiration from this New York Times article about serendipity and the concept of super-encounterers. One of the researchers from the University of Missouri talked about different types of encounters: there’s a kind of non-encounter, where everything is set and they go about their day; the medium encounters, where an occasional thing will happen as a surprise or happy encounter; and then there is this wonderful term, which I loved, called the super-encounterer. He talks about the reporter Gay Talese, who in the 1960s declared that:

“‘New York is a city of things unnoticed’ and delegated himself to be the one who noticed. Thus, he transformed the Isle of Manhattan into the Isle of Serendip: he traced the perambulations of feral cats, cataloged shoeshine purveyors, tracked down statistics related to the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium and discovered a colony of ants at the top of the Empire State Building. He published his findings in a little book titled New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey.”

Super-encounterers find the string, and are able to follow it. They are constantly seeking ways to activate the power within them. I think designers have a natural super-encounterer relationship to space, and are looking for and finding these patterns. I was enamored by these weird and enigmatic super-encounterers, and how it relates to design. Even resurrecting the flâneur in this context. The researcher in the article said it helped that the super-encounterers really believed they would find these interlocking connections and surprises, which helps close the cycle.

KE: That’s wonderful. I do remember something about that in The New York Times. The potential for connection is there, and that it is a matter of detecting it—a matter of reading the spatial language of a heavy information system.

DK: Yes. I keep coming back to that. I’m always thinking about: How does this play into the body, in relationship to its environment? What are all the possible layers and aspects of understanding of our own body in space?

There are scientific, neurological observation processes where labs are looking at what neurons do when people walk from point A to point B. And there is a significant history of metrics that can be put around the physical. But, there is also all of this unmeasurable stuff. What do we call this unmeasurable stuff? How does it relate to the body?

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 3 of 8.

In my class, “The Mechanical Artifact,” we put a student on a parabolic Zero-G research flight, where the body is put in zero gravity for 15 seconds at a time. It is somewhat extreme. It allows someone to be in an environment where their body is put under very different circumstances. Even though they are in a plane, they are floating. The class looks at how to design an architectural space or environment that would relate to the body in this kind of free-form fall, as a way to reorient our awareness.

If we don’t know what this new environment’s going to be in the future—for example, if we all end up in off-planet life—what will those relationships between the body and the space look like? If we go completely outside of our environment and look at that, and then come back down to this planet, is there something that we can extract from that? This would be some type of affordance, or a way of further understanding something we don’t even have language for yet. The body as an interpolation to the spaces, and the impact that they have.

This builds from my conversation with Sarah Oppenheimer for Maquette. We based our interview on something called the isovist, which is a new favorite term of mine. It is anything that can be perceived from the position you’re standing in. My isovist right now is: I’m looking forward, and I can see all the way out my window⁠—all the way to a tree that’s probably 500 feet away. But that’s only within a certain frame. And then it’s cut off by a dresser and a bed in the house. I could imagine what your isovist is right now. I don’t know what’s in front of you or behind you, but it creates these beautiful spatial dimensions.

When I was reading about your concepts related to spatial potentials, I was also thinking: How do we measure those? How do we map them? Are they even mappable?

KE: I have seen isovist mappings, but I didn’t know there was a word for this. I’m thinking back to the flâneur, and about the untapped potentials of the human body. We generally are not thinking about things like the stretches and ranges of space that our eyes can see, or what our internal organs are like. I say this as a performer who first trained in theater before architecture. The potential of what the body can do and know is so stunted by conditioning. Medium Design begins with a straw man critique of modern Enlightenment habits of mind—the love of abstraction, ideational monotheism, the one and only and the Manichean struggle. The capacities of the human body are underexploited and under rehearsed. They are pounded into you when you’re a little kid, to know the right answer to things and be able to name things. It’s a nominative habit of mind, instead of an active infinitive habit of mind.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 4 of 8.

I hadn’t really thought about the flâneur in such a long time. The flâneur is performing art in another active register within which optics are only a part. They are detecting active potentials or dispositions in a context.

DK: Like a detective. I hadn’t thought about the flâneur either until I read the serendipity articles. I thought, Wait a minute, how would this fit in? I started looking at images. I was showing my students the classic flâneur image of the 19th century gentleman walking the turtle through the streets of Paris:

Image by Sarah Feng, 2022.

There’s so much more we need to know. The flâneur makes me think of disassociation, or almost removal. Removing oneself from the performance, and entering another performance, but sharing the same space. This ties into your idea of successive technology, the obsessive belief of replacing the old with the new, only to find that it is the exact same thing⁠—a force, a pressure of measuring success within the endless updating of technology. A recycling of it. Is there a flâneur 2.0, in tech terms?

Image by Chloe Hou, 2022.

KE: As you talk about that, I think of, among many things, the novelist, dramatist, and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter in an interview titled “The Re-enchantment of Humanism.” She thinks around and beyond the last five hundred years of Enlightenment mono-ideational thinking and monocultures. What might be the capacities of a re-enchanted human?

Enriched thinking is not only an advance. It is not only a modern move prompted by a new technology. It may even be the shedding of that modern habit and a sense of how to make more complex mixtures with existing, underexplored capacities of humans. In the fiction I write, there is a reference to “loud-brained humans”—aggressive, nominative beings who are only aware of their bodies if they are in extreme conditions.

DK: Yes, because it’s not new. The feedback is so desensitized, or sanitized. They’re looking for the extreme or the new. I’m trying to think of what the inversion would be, in the primitive or primal. The word ‘re-enchantment’ makes me wonder if there is some type of transcendence, or sound, like Tibetan sonic bowls. People are looking for that, but I think they’re looking in the wrong places. It also reminds me of the quest of exertion of the mountain hiker, or the tech executives who need to go climb Everest. This conquering of the space—it’s becoming a human need.

I’m curious to know more about your fiction.

KE: Well, you might not call them short stories. They are an experiment with mixing different narrative forms from different series. There are several series. One explores more-than-human powers—“Crooked,” “Atomized,” “Still,” “Tight,” “Thin,” “Loose,” “Layered.” They describe incredible powers that are accessible, but just under-developed. Then there are other series: fictional essays, cocktails, non-stories or stories without event, direct addresses, parallel voices, stories from another time, and dialogues. Hopefully mixing and interplay between the series generates something beyond their content. The texts are independent but integrated, and they share correspondences, repetitions, and hidden pictures.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 5 of 8.

DK: I would be an eager reader, if those ever get released into the world. When you mentioned serialization, it reminded me of a term you used in Medium Design: “the unexpected bounce of aesthetic signals in culture.” You were referring to the explorations of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière. What is that, in your mind? What is that feeling?

︎The texts are independent but integrated, and they share correspondences, repetitions, and hidden pictures.

KE: Rancière makes a distinction between the aesthetics of the connoisseur who taxonomizes in art historical categories and the aesthetic practices that generate or enact a politics. He writes about the politics of aesthetics, or the way in which aesthetic signals bounce in culture. They might even be decoupled from their presumed or stated message. He gives the example of Madame Bovary, or A Sentimental Education. In both, a relatively conservative Gustave Flaubert wasn’t expressing liberatory thoughts, and yet, the book was received in that way. It inspired liberatory activities. I always give the example in class of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” You know, the lyrics are about Edie Sedgwick, a bratty rich girl. But it’s the sound of his voice, screaming, How does it fee-el? that ends up being theme music to a counterculture summer. You can’t know how things will land, but you can be aware of how they are landing and in a certain context.

This may link to the discussion of serendipity. I am not sure. Or is it a similar collision? There are thinkers like literary theorist Caroline Levine—who would land somewhere between structuralism and post-structuralism. They’re noting the affordances of forms. But they are still focused on the political potentials in their unpredictable collisions. There are unpredictable collisions about which you can still detect component chemistries.

DK: It’s an awareness of not losing control of the collisions. I don’t know why I thought of this, but when you mentioned post-structuralist and structuralist, I thought of where I grew up, in the suburbs of St. Louis. I thought it was the best place in the world until I went to architecture school. During my second year at the University of Kansas, I attended a film architecture class, and we were reading theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Sanford Kwinter. We watched the movie Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio. When I went back home, I thought: Wait a minute, something is wrong with this place! And I gave my parents, who are not designers, a whole manifesto about why the suburbs are wrong, and why our house didn’t make sense. I completely lost it, with the ammunition from what I’d been reading. I was fired up! I suddenly saw something in a new light that I had been living inside of for a long time. That was complicated—and also funny.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 6 of 8.

It led me to doing research on Thomas Kinkade, the self-styled “Painter of Light,” who made all those Christmas tree trinkets that light up underneath. He made these kitschy, mass-produced pastoral paintings of countryside cottages. He’s the most profitable American artist who is not recognized by the art world. He monetized his art, and opened little galleries inside shopping malls all across America. Some of the paintings have more value: If he painted it, for example, or if one of his team touched it up. This escalated into an empire. It sold a dream of another kind of landscape. There’s this suburban development in California—Taylor Woodrow built a subdivision called Hiddenbrooke based off of these paintings, that has about a hundred homes. Each one comes with the Kincaid paintings inside, and the most prominent one over the fireplace.

Reading all this, it all felt like a closed loop: this suburban art that turned into the suburb itself. It left me thinking that there is no room for an interplay of interactions. My response was to think up a project: A contract that new suburban homebuyers would sign, that would contain an unpredictability clause. A wolf or monster could be sent to the property at any given moment to terrorize your family for a day to provide some excitement! This type of clause could be built into the longevity of the home—what if that were the latent space of home?

KE: A Black Mirror scenario that is again, startling—not because it is sci-fi, but because it is and has always been. Maybe your story only makes palpable the ways in which people have to sign up to be the victims of racial discrimination and predatory lending. They sometimes have no choice but to sign up to be literally preyed upon. Medium Design is trying to train an ability to detect not only the felicitous collisions, but also the violent ones—the latent, unspoken potentials to erase, poison, and torment with imbalanced power dynamics, environmental pollution, data monopolies, and murderous policing. In your brilliant and dark scenario, it is as if even these factors have been monetized like points on your mortgage.

DK: Yes! Risk points, but completely inverted into some horror movie!

KE: I too, grew up in the suburbs. You go outside blinking in the naked sun, and there’s a tiny little house, set 60 feet away from a 60-foot-wide street, then another 60 feet of yellow front yard, and another tiny little house. It was all specially designed so that if a giant truck was going really fast and jumped off the road, it wouldn’t hit your house. All these traffic-engineered dimensions and turning radii, and nothing gets near enough to interact. It is terrifying.

DK: And the reveal of that, whether inhabitants know it or not. They don’t see it. I’ve always been fascinated by those in-between pockets that can be found in the suburbs. The only place I can think of where an encounter could occur is the parking lot of the big box grocery store. When people leave their car and walk into the store, there’s almost a free zone, or cease-fire of control, leading to unpredictability. They might bump into someone familiar, which doesn’t happen that frequently. I’ve always wanted to create more from the in-between space. Pushing for more interaction, trying to find a pocket inside of the system, at the gateway to the local Wegmans. Which has delicious pizza, by the way.

In Medium Design, you also mention “the switch,” which was such a treat to read about. Transportation switching, and the reorganizing of how we’re moving across space and time. Recently while in New York, I had this incredible switching moment. I was late for my train up to New Haven. I was on my way to the new Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station. I got tangled in the spatial dynamics of the Hudson Yards, where there was this series of urban levels, and I kept having to level switch. I was running, walking, scooting, stepping, shifting. For the final minute, I scooted all the way through to the new station through a series of ramps, hopped off, folded up the scooter, and made the train. Foot to scooter, scooter to train, go! I was in a taxi at one point. It all happened so quickly and easily. It was enlightening, though a little stressful, the way it compressed time. I wasn’t quite happy with the experience, but it excited me to think about the way you’re writing about it.

KE: You were doing parkour through the transportation systems! The first time I ever wrote about switching was in Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America. Then I did a project based on this idea that was actually applied to that area of the city and exhibited at the Queens Museum. They became ossified by real estate, but it had all the potential. As the social scientist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson said: “A switch is a thing that is not.” It is not a thing. It is a delta or the registration of a change. Just as serendipity is not something you can plan, but you can set up the potential for something to happen.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 7 of 8.

We have managed to segregate most transportation infrastructure. A highway interchange is not a place of changing, but a place of staying the same. The morphology is all about keeping the same speed to make a turn. In transposing intelligence from digital networks to physical networks, many of the things that could have introduced switching and therefore more redundancy, were removed. More chances to make connections were removed. Attempts to get rid of old technology and replace it with the new just make the whole assembly even dumber.

As a researcher, I think we have to get better at not only measuring the outcome of events, but also measuring the potentials for change in various scenarios. It is a crucial kind of creative modeling that is more than either data visualization or quantitative proof.

This business of medium design is a little bit like playing pool. You can’t know the answer to playing pool, but you can know something about what to do next. There is no right answer to managing transportation networks, but approaches that mix transportation of different capacities—high capacity transit with fleets of cars, bikes and pedestrians—offer one of those moments to take a shot.

︎Serendipity is not something you can plan, but you can set up the potential for something to happen.

DK: Up against all the data, quantifiable results, or metric⁠—how does one get everybody to believe in that switch? How do master planners propose it? They’re rolling out an X amount of the undefined, within a plan. It’s the quantification obsession. At CCAM, there was an artist who was working with a group of scientists. They ended up not getting along, because a scientist wanted the artist to clearly show that they were using a quantum mechanics equation. The scientists wanted it to be specific, so that people could look at the art, and understand the equation. And the artist was like, You can’t. That’s not what this is about. I’m not trying to disagree. It got a little tense. It makes me think of this obsession of the “correct” and the “right” and how that relates to the sciences. It is complex, because there’s no metric for art, and I don’t know if there needs to be.

KE: Yes. There are many relationships and potentials to model, some of which can be quantified. But creative modeling of protocols that build more information-rich mixtures—in transportation or any other sector is essential and should have more authority in decision making. Innovation is not only the new technology, but the conception of protocols for the way things go together. Otherwise, we’re just more precisely measuring our doom.

Subtraction Forest/Jungle, Keller Easterling, 2014. Sequence 8 of 8.

For more information on Keller Easterling, visit her site.

Dana Karwas is an artist whose sculptures and research investigate new, human reference frames for dimensional information. Dana is Director of the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) at Yale and is a Critic at the Yale School of Architecture teaching courses related to mechanized perception, space architecture, and inverting our relationship to the cultural forms of our time. She holds an MPS from Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kansas. Her upcoming short film about the future of the anthroprocosmos, Terra Cosma, will premiere in New Haven, Connecticut in February 2023.

︎A Coefficient of Luck︎Ian Cheng in conversation with Alex Zafiris︎A Coefficient of Luck︎Ian Cheng in conversation with Alex Zafiris

I want to mimic the language of a dream as a way to bridge things that are beyond us—too complex, too strange, moving too fast.︎I want to mimic the language of a dream as a way to bridge things that are beyond us—too complex, too strange, moving too fast.︎

A world is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game.︎A world is the web of relations that flourishes around a repeatable game.︎

Carl Jung said: “In the filth, it will be found.”︎Carl Jung said: “In the filth, it will be found.”︎

︎Active Infinitive︎Dana Karwas in conversation with Keller Easterling︎Active Infinitive︎Dana Karwas in conversation with Keller Easterling

There is already a dance between things.︎There is already a dance between things.︎

︎The texts are independent but integrated, and they share correspondences, repetitions, and hidden pictures.

︎Serendipity is not something you can plan, but you can set up the potential for something to happen.

︎What I’m Working On︎Roxanne Harris︎What I’m Working On︎Roxanne Harris︎What I’m Working On︎Roxanne Harris

Everything I do co-exists, each part is integral, part of the other’s processes.︎Everything I do co-exists, each part is integral, part of the other’s processes.︎

I optimize my code writing to allow me to be very expressive.︎I optimize my code writing to allow me to be very expressive.︎

For more information about Roxanne Harris, who performs as alsoknownasrox, visit her site and listen to her playlist.

︎What I’m Working On︎Madeline Pages︎What I’m Working On︎Madeline Pages︎What I’m Working On︎Madeline Pages

What is exciting and special to me about the medium of performance is its extreme contemporariness, its nowness.︎

Humans’ interaction with outer space, the Moon, stars, and other bodies that lie beyond Earth’s atmosphere, has overwhelmed my imagination.︎

︎What I’m Working On︎Dana Karwas ︎What I’m Working On︎Dana Karwas ︎What I’m Working On︎Dana Karwas

︎The Creativity Lab︎Matthew Suttor︎The Creativity Lab︎Matthew Suttor

Einstein intuited connections and bridges between things, such as mass and energy, where others saw only chasms.︎

I propose scientists come to us, the artists, to investigate their ideas.︎I propose scientists come to us, the artists, to investigate their ideas.︎

︎Fragments of Fate: William S. Burroughs and his Cut-ups︎Alex Zafiris︎Fragments of Fate: William S. Burroughs and his Cut-ups︎Alex Zafiris

︎He began to speak of spirituality, God, and learned of maktoub, Arabic for “it is written,” or “it is destined.”

︎They were a perfect technology to corrupt the rhythm, syntax, metaphor, and tone of socialized narrative and speech, using only a pair of scissors and sleight of hand.

︎A Flash of Newness︎Jace Clayton a.k.a. DJ /rupture︎A Flash of Newness︎Jace Clayton a.k.a. DJ /rupture

It was a way to think about entering into the digital, and how the digital allows for the world to be interpreted as data.︎

I was really fascinated in how white noise specifically was used. It’s often to indicate the swing of the track, the human push-pull of subjective time.︎

︎Memory Crystal︎Anežka Minaříková︎Memory Crystal︎Anežka Minaříková

He explained that a sound wave never disappears. That it travels through space for eternity.︎

Designing feels similar—like I’m playing a simulation game—because of the software.︎

It was created using the Schiller phenomenon, which is common in labradorite and moonstone.︎

︎Through Line︎Lisa Kereszi︎Through Line︎Lisa Kereszi

Together, these visual elements come into focus in an expert visual rhyme.︎Together, these visual elements come into focus in an expert visual rhyme.︎

Something bigger than ourselves shows up again and again in images.︎

︎The Camera on the Roof︎Damian Loeb︎The Camera on the Roof︎Damian Loeb

︎Creating this relationship to the live stream is similar to having a metaverse.︎Creating this relationship to the live stream is similar to having a metaverse.

︎This ephemerality makes this footage experiential.︎This ephemerality makes this footage experiential.

︎A Prepared Mind︎David Caruso and Zorana Ivcevic Pringle︎A Prepared Mind︎David Caruso and Zorana Ivcevic Pringle

Emotion management does not mean emotion suppression.︎Emotion management does not mean emotion suppression.︎

There is no such thing as a happy warrior.︎There is no such thing as a happy warrior.︎

A serendipitous encounter is not always a happy thing; it could be an event which deeply disturbed you, that angers you.︎

︎Bilateral Symmetry︎Anahita Vossoughi︎Bilateral Symmetry︎Anahita Vossoughi

︎Set + Play︎Jun Jung︎Set + Play ︎Jun Jung︎Set + Play ︎Jun Jung

︎I started looking for the balance between restriction and freedom.︎I started looking for the balance between restriction and freedom.

︎I like the fact that—even though you can come up with a system—it is still hard to anticipate what the result will be.

For more information on Jun Jung, visit jun-jung.com

︎Threshold Spaces︎Balarama Heller︎Threshold Spaces︎Balarama Heller︎Threshold Spaces︎Balarama Heller

Light is the symbolic, physical, and spiritual seed of significance that we might call consciousness.︎Light is the symbolic, physical, and spiritual seed of significance that we might call consciousness.︎

The images I am drawn to create are essentially symbols and archetypes that thread the major components of life together.︎The images I am drawn to create are essentially symbols and archetypes that thread the major components of life together.︎

For more information on Balarama Heller, visit balaramaheller.com

︎The CCAM Checking Stick︎ CCAM Team ︎The CCAM Checking Stick︎ CCAM Team ︎The CCAM Checking Stick︎ CCAM Team

︎Editor’s Letter︎Alex Zafiris︎Editor’s Letter︎Alex Zafiris︎Editor’s Letter︎Alex Zafiris︎Editor’s Letter︎Alex Zafiris