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What is a World? And how does one bring it to life?
Emissaries Guide to Worlding is both a behind-the-scenes chronicle and a philosophical companion to one of the most ambitious experiments in simulation art of the 21st century.
This richly illustrated, full-colour hardback brings readers into the conceptual and technical process of creating Emissaries (2015 - 2017) -- a trilogy of simulations about cognitive evolution and ecological emergence. As Cheng built his agentic beings, he also began a theory of Worlding: the unnatural art of designing systems that grow, change, and take on a life of their own.
Now returning in a revised collector's edition with a new preface and updated materials, this is the foundational artifact of Cheng's thinking on Worlding--where theory and practice emerge side by side. Released alongside WORLDING: A Guide for Creators in Changing Times, its distilled and expanded successor, this edition offers the origin: a record of Worlding as lived process.
About the author
Ian Cheng is an artist and founder based in New York. He has exhibited at museums internationally including MoMA, Serpentine Galleries, Venice Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art.
Since 2012, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment, culminating in the Emissaries trilogy. He is the creator of BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI-driven creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions. In 2024 Cheng founded Opponent, a new company building animal-level AI agents for kids.
