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 Luma Foundation, Arles now, at The Shed, New York (Sept 10 - Dec 19), and at Light Art Space (LAS), Berlin 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, 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.