Emissaries Guide to Worlding

Part exhibition book, part instruction manual, Emissaries Guide to Worlding is Ian Cheng's attempt to write down what making a world actually requires. It reads less like a catalogue than like a working method handed over for others to use.

Published by Koenig Books with the Serpentine Galleries and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo on the occasion of Cheng's 2018 Serpentine exhibition, the 320-page volume derives its argument from Emissaries (2015–17), his trilogy of live simulations, each built around a figure caught between an unraveling reality and a strange emerging one. Cheng proposes four masks a maker must be able to wear in turn (the Director, the Cartoonist, the Hacker and the Emissary) and treats worlding as a whole-brain discipline for holding attention and agency inside conditions that will not stay still. Edited by Joseph Constable, Rebecca Lewin and Veronica So, with texts by Nora Khan, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers.

Cheng, born in Los Angeles in 1984, has since extended the same line of thinking into BOB (Bag of Beliefs) and the Life After BOB anime. He kept revising the guide after the book appeared: version 1.0, retitled Emissary's Guide To Worlding, was released digitally by Metis Suns in November 2018.