Ian Cheng

My work to date assumes a biological and behavioral impulse at the heart of every technology. Whether it’s YouTube (a service), the iPhone (an object), or motion capture (a process), these are all technical formats through which humans mirror and extend their primordial compulsions, but with dislocative behavioral and cultural baggage.

The basic aspiration of my work is to model a more realist methodology towards composing with these formats by opening them back up to their behavioral, bodily, and evolutionary influences, while not denying their advanced cultural function.

Currently I am extending my corrupted motion capture methodology to encompass artificial intelligence simulations that can produce emergent, unscripted behavior and choreographies in order to cinematically model the evolutionary processes found in primordial biological systems. I am working toward the production of feature-length animated works in which I will be able to push motion capture and AI simulation far beyond their elegant use in Hollywood movies, and materialize a radically economical form of visually unbounded filmmaking.

NOTE FROM FAMILY
“Truth is, the homo sapien has not biologically and cognitively evolved as fast as it has externally manipulated its landscape and advanced its conditions of living. This dislocation between our (still) primordial internal instincts and the external prosthetics we have advanced is precisely the gap that homo sapiens now need to account for and unnaturally correct. Undo your humanity. Learn from flora, fauna, molecules, and dust. Go be something and then not be, son.”
– ♥ Mom & Dad & Grandma & Grandpa & Grandma & Grandpa &…