Brian Reitzell composed a multi-level score for the animated art installation Ian Cheng: Life After BOB, now screening at The Shed gallery in New York through December 19th.
“Ian Cheng’s Life After BOB is an episodic anime series built in the Unity game engine and presented live in real time, imagining a future world in which our minds are co-inhabited by AI entities. Bridging the artist’s interest in both open-ended simulation and the capacity of cinematic storytelling to evoke deep psychological truths, Life After BOB asks: How will life lived with AI transform the archetypal scripts that guide our sense of a meaningful existence?
Working with an expansive production team, Cheng developed this 48-minute narrative animation using traditional animation storytelling techniques alongside Unity and its suite of real-time cinematic tools. Through this innovative approach, Life After BOB incorporates real-time changes unique to each viewing. The exhibition will showcase a large-scale screening of the narrative animation that foregrounds the drama of the story, paired with an interactive “World Watching” presentation of the animation that allows viewers to freely explore the details of the Life After BOB world at their own tempo. Viewers are invited to learn more at the Life After BOB wiki, which catalogues characters and artifacts, flora and fauna, and every background detail seen in the episode. The viewer is invited to contribute to and edit this wiki. These edits in turn permanently modify the details of the onscreen world, thereby extending Life After BOB into a new form of programmable narrative media.”
Click here for more information on Ian Cheng: Life After BOB