Vdrome will be streaming the live simulation work ‘Something Thinking of You’ by Ian Cheng on their website throughout the month of August.
Ian Cheng’s Something Thinking of You (2015) is a performative allegory concerning the relation between consciousness and intelligence. Since the modern Enlightenment, the distinction between the human being and other creatures is founded on intelligence – the capacity to think, recognize, perceive and differentiate. Cheng’s film argues, by contrast, that technology now has the ability to make decisions of its own.
In a free adaptation of the book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by the psychologist Julian Jaynes (1978), Cheng’s work is a filmic experiment examining the boundaries of intellect. Jaynes advanced the hypothesis that human beings formerly did not have a reflective consciousness but experienced vocal hallucinations instead. These were comprehended as voices of authority and were obeyed. Deferring to the instructions of such voices meant delegating the responsibility for one’s decisions, which led to easing the burdens of the psyche. As life’s realities grew more complicated over time, this mental system could no longer withstand stressful situations and the ensuing collapse led to the formation of a consciousness and an ego that took responsibility for itself.
Ian Cheng takes up this chain of thought in his animated film Something Thinking of You in which organisms undertake a walk to the unknown. Insofar as the film is partly pre-programmed according to a screenplay, and partly contains live simulations that are generated anew at each shown, it puts the comprehensive faculty of these agents as well as its own underlying software to the test. In story lines which never repeat themselves, Something Thinking of You allows the viewer to observe how the behaviour of these agents and their relationship to each other changes. Will the system break down here and lead to the emergence of a new type of cognition? What is still considered to be the subject here, what is considered human and what living?
Ian Cheng
Something Thinking of You, 2015
Live simulation, infinite duration, sound
Streaming live on Vdrome throughout August 2015
www.vdrome.org