BOB (Bag Of Beliefs), (2018-2019), Ian Cheng

In 2024, the Julia Stoschek Foundation offered me a chance to work alongside conservator Andreas Weisser to create a proactive preservation plan for Cheng’s 2018-2019 live simulation BOB (Bag Of Beliefs), wherein the artist displays an AI as a captive animal. This AI is BOB, a red hydra-like creature, who wriggles around a virtual environment, eating, defecating, and occasionally suffering bodily harm from “offerings” sent by audience-members. BOB marked a turning point in Cheng’s output and was germinal to an ongoing series (including Life After BOB) in which the audience can change aspects of the work itself. For example, BOB viewers can interact with BOB by downloading the BOB Shrine app on their smartphones and making offerings of items like mushrooms, luck stones, or proximity bombs at a personal “shrine” to BOB. These offerings are accompanied by short phrases of “parental guidance” which may be viewed by BOB as more or less trustworthy. When BOB selects a user’s shrine, their offerings are dumped into BOB’s virtual enclosure. Interacting with offerings can affect not only BOB’s body, but also his belief structure, and thus his future behavior.

In 2018-2019, BOB was a prescient example of the AI-driven artworks we are increasingly surrounded by today following the release of a suite of AI-enhanced digital tools for general consumers since late 2022. The preservation challenges of this “artificial lifeform” of “infinite duration,” I anticipated, not only provoked technical questions, but also increasingly urgent ethical questions about the moral subjecthood of Artificial General Intelligences (AGIs), both within and beyond art collections. While BOB is no AGI, the work foregrounds the impact human actions have on AI agents, rather than more commonly voiced anxieties about current and future impacts of AIs on humans.

While BOB, at age 5, is hardly an “old” work by art historical standards, the aging process is far more rapid in the world of information technology. BOB’s external dependencies also increase his fragility. When collectors of a BOB (which is editioned in 10 + 3 APs) receive the artwork, they receive two apps – one to manage the tiled monitor display, and the other to run the BOB itself. They do not receive any control over the BOB Shrine apps for iOS or Android, nor the two servers required for the work to fully function – one of which approves the owner’s license to run the BOB app, while the other syncs the BOBs with the shrines. Currently, the artist’s studio maintains these servers but has not yet announced a strategy for their long-term accessibility. While the studio also regularly updates the mobile apps, this updating could cease at any time, and it seems likely that the mobile phone application format itself will not be in common use into the latter half of the twenty-first century, so another solution will likely be required.

If audiences cannot interact with BOB through their shrines, BOB can be displayed with automatically generated “bot shrines” to send offerings. This mode still honors the artist’s stated preference for the work’s presentation “with the analogy of a reptile house or zoological display in mind to evoke a sense of ALIVENESS.” But in this situation, the zoo animal is in pseudo-solitary confinement, and the audience loses the opportunity to communicate with him. While we are increasingly accustomed to interacting with chatbot AIs like ChatGPT, Cheng’s work shows the audience the potential consequences of their input into BOB’s artificial mind, evoking a sense of responsibility difficult to feel for an invisible AI. Moreover, BOB’s mutable, alien body separates him from commonly anthropomorphic representations of AIs, and this very otherness makes him easier to identify as a kind of pet that might make claims on us to care for or even “parent” it. With no opportunity for “parental guidance”, that relationship is lost.

BOB’s fragility is not news to Cheng’s studio, which has done an exemplary job documenting the artist’s authorized installation formats and long-term intentions for the work. They have also been very helpful in issuing updates to make sure the BOB app can be played on Macs running operating systems more recent than the work’s original Mojave 10.14, which is no longer supported or secure. In the long term, Cheng has also expressed openness to showing the work in an emulated software environment, which may become necessary without these periodic updates, as new operating systems released annually by Apple are only supported for three years.

The Julia Stoschek Foundation’s BOB shares its external dependencies with BOBs housed in other collections. Thus, caring for one BOB in many ways entails caring for all of them. BOB’s long-term preservation will probably require coordination across institutions, as well as with the artist and his future representatives, to provide the requisite network of care for these networked creatures.