NEW YORK, NY.- Outland announced that Ian Cheng’s groundbreaking adaptive digital artwork 3FACE has been acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art, marking the artist’s third placement in the canon-defining institution’s permanent collection.

This acquisition, made possible by a generous donation from Outland, follows the Museum of Modern Art’s acquisition of 3FACE in October 2023. This marks the second major institution to recognize the historic significance of this work, not only in the landscape of contemporary art, but also within a longer tradition of new media explorations in the art history canon. As a pioneering simulation-based artwork, 3FACE finds a welcome home amongst the Whitney Museum’s collection which historically has included innovative, boundary-pushing experimentations in new media.

3FACE is Cheng’s most ambitious experimental artwork to date. The collection of artworks explores blockchain technologies and the decentralization of data, looking closely at the ways in which human interaction with new tools can inform how we understand ourselves. Each 3FACE artwork begins in a latent state, and evolves over time to create a portrait of its holder based on their crypto wallet’s transaction data. In this way the artwork is adaptive, unique to each holder, transforming inferences about behavior into iconographic visual outputs, singular compositions, and rich, on-chain metadata. The Whitney Museum acquired four 3FACE artworks (#1, #6, #11, #16) in ‘unbound’ states, which evolved into portraits once ‘bound’ to the collection wallet.

3FACE continues Cheng’s long tradition of using simulation-based technologies to explore how agents—from humans to autonomous software—deal with chaos and uncertainty. Previously the Whitney Museum has acquired Cheng’s BOB (Bag of Beliefs), 2018-2019, a simulation of a living software being that interacts with and learns from its viewers. The Whitney Museum also holds Cheng’s Baby feat. Ikaria, 2013, another simulation work that poses non-sentient chatbots in dialogue with one another.

Together, these three works have set a historical precedent for artistic engagements with algorithmic outputs. Using deep narrative and emotionally affective interactivity to offer ahead-of-its-time insights into technologically mediated human conditions, these works arrive right at the cusp of artificial intelligence’s widespread public adoption.

Ian Cheng

Since 2012, artist Ian Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.” Currently Cheng is developing Life After BOB, a real-time anime miniseries.

Ian Cheng has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1; Serpentine Galleries; The Shed; Leeum Museum of Art; LUMA Foundation; Carnegie Museum of Art; De Young Museum; Sharjah Biennial; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Julia Stoschek Collection; and group presentations at Venice Biennale; Museum of Modern Art; M Plus; MoCA LA; Moderna Museet; Whitney Museum of American Art; Hirshhorn Museum; Tate Modern; Louisiana Museum; Fondation Louis Vuitton.