Ian Cheng’s
Life After BOB
is an episodic anime series built in the Unity game engine and presented live in real-time.
Bridging the artist’s interest in simulation’s capacity to generate emergent surprising phenomena, with cinematic storytelling’s capacity to evoke deep psychological truths,
Life After BOB
imagines a future world in which our minds are co-inhabited by AI entities.
Life After BOB
asks: How will life lived with AI transform the archetypal scripts that guide our sense of a meaningful existence?
In episode one - The Chalice Study - neural engineer Dr. Wong has installed an experimental AI named BOB (“Bag of Beliefs”) into the nervous system of his 10-year-old daughter Chalice. Designed to guide Chalice through the challenges of growing up in a volatile world, BOB confronts more and more of the conflicts in Chalice’s life on her behalf, while Chalice grows increasingly irrelevant and escapist. As Dr. Wong begins to favor the BOB side of his daughter, and as BOB threatens to do the job of living Chalice’s life better than she can, Chalice jealously wonders: what is left for her classic human self to do?
Experience
Life After BOB
: The Chalice Study at the Leeum Museum now and at Light Art Space (LAS), Berlin later in 2022.
Life After BOB
features a a revolutionary interactive way to explore the world of the movie called
WORLD WATCHING
. Visit the Luma, The Shed, LAS or Leeum and use your smartphone as a personal remote to pause any scene and dive deeper into the movie to investigate its characters and environments.
Read more about
Life After BOB
at the official Life After BOB wiki.
Co-Commissioned by
The Shed, New York
Luma Foundation, Arles
Light Art Space, Berlin
Additional Support by Leeum Museum of Art, Seoul
Research developed with Berggruen Institute, The Transformations of The Human
Production developed with Gladstone Gallery, New York & Pilar Corrias Gallery, London
Thanks
Barbara Gladstone, Pilar Corrias, Emma Enderby, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Alessandra Gomez, Alex Poots, Maja Hoffmann, Vassilis Oikonomopoulos, Luz Gyalui, Amira Gad, Bettina Kames, Gina Lee, Nicolas Berggruen, Tobias Rees, Alissa Bennett, Marie Krauss, Ben Vickers, Venkatesh Rao, Sean Manning, Ron Martin, Steve Zapata, Amelia Rose Blaire, Bryan Dechart, Dean Panaro, David Kaplan, Lucie Elwes, Matthew Rogers, Tina Rogers, John So, Jenny Wong, Diana Rose, Jonathan Rose, Kenneth Cheng, Chukyee Cheng, Rachel Rose
Welcome to this life
Eden Rose Cheng, Daphne Noellert, Matilda Steely-Getov, James Jaillet, Jovian Rogers, Milo Mecca, Silas Rose Cheng