It’s not so much real life but artificial life that fascinates New York-based artist Ian Cheng. At the root of his ongoing project Life After BOB is a 50-minute narrative anime, The Chalice Study, whose protagonist, Chalice, has had an experimental AI named BOB (Bag of Beliefs) placed into her nervous system by her neural engineer father. Cheng envisions it as the first of an eight-episode series, which will not only explore a variety of characters, each offering reflections on AI technology, but will also look at aesthetic and scientific capacities, as each episode absorbs new modes of making, collaboration, networking and play.
is presented largely as a traditionally projected artist film, though future episodes will
