In my spare time, I like to visit various art galleries and museums in New York City.  I decided to visit the MoMA PS1 in Long Island City this past Friday.  As a CUNY student, you can get a ticket for free, which you should definitely take full advantage of, considering people from out of state would come and pay full price to view these exhibitions.  

Out of the many exhibitions on display right now, my favorite was Ian Cheng’s Emissaries, which is there until September 25th.  Essentially, it’s a trilogy of “live simulations” created through the use of a video game engine.  Cheng explains it as “a video game that plays itself,” in which the characters and their environment create their own narratives in real time.  The stories that are generated are endless.  The only reason I know this is because I did some research and read the information on the wall before entering the room.  So the room is divided into three sections.  The first one is called Emissary in the Squat of Gods.  There’s a bench that you can sit on while you observe the narratives that unfold.  From what I recall, there was a bunch of distorted human beings interacting with each other and performing different tasks.  Upon research, they’re considered to be “an ancient community living under the threat of a volcanic eruption” and I thought it was interesting that within this story, there’s a young emissary who is trying to lead this community away from this danger.  Before I forget, an emissary is someone who is given a special assignment on behalf of someone else.  The second section is titled Emissary Forks at Perfection, which takes place after the volcano has become fertile.  There’s a Shiba emissary, which is absolutely amazing, because I love dogs and seeing this one interact with other Shibas and mankind was fascinating.  The final section is called Emissary Sunsets the Self.  There’s a whole story behind this one, but from what I saw, it appeared to be a group of AI (artificial intelligence) set on fire.  This one actually has a live stream online at https://www.twitch.tv/moma.  There were other cool exhibitions at the MoMA PS1, but I was particularly drawn to the peculiarity of Emissaries, since I’ve never seen anything like it before.