WORLDING: A Guide for Creators in Changing Times

What is a World? How do I create one? How do I keep it alive? And when should I set it free?

There is a new art emerging, ripe for our strange and complex times: Worlding – the practice of creating dynamic systems that take on a life of their own.

Now in print for the first time, WORLDING is an essential handbook for artists, founders, parents, and creators of all kinds. Drawing on Cheng's experience as an artist building multi-agent simulations, the book offers practical methods for making worlds by channeling four creative personas inside every creator: the Director, Cartoonist, Hacker, and Emissary.

This edition gathers Cheng's original writings on Worlding, alongside a foreword by Venkatesh Rao and the Worlding Raga dialogues between the two.

Part psychological reflection, part creative guide, WORLDING explores ways to navigate darkness and sustain agency in a time of unraveling old realities and emerging weird ones.

Ian Cheng is an artist and founder based in New York. He has exhibited at museums internationally including MoMA, Serpentine Galleries, Venice Biennale, Whitney Museum of American Art.

Since 2012, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment, culminating in the Emissaries trilogy. He is the creator of BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI-driven creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions. In 2024 Cheng founded Opponent, a new company building animal-level AI agents for kids.

Venkatesh Rao is a writer and consultant. He writes the popular Contraptions newsletter. Between 2007–24, he wrote the popular Ribbonfarm blog (now archived). He is the author of Tempo, a book on timing and decision-making, and is currently working on his second book, on the foundations of temporality. He has been an independent consultant since 2011, supporting senior executives in the technology industry. His work in recent years has focused on AI, semiconductor, sustainability, and protocol technology sectors. He holds a PhD in control theory (2003) from the University of Michigan.