The Game of Whispers (2024) is a five-channel audiovisual artwork that models the dynamics of rumor, power, and narrative distortion through embodied AI agents. Developed within a real-time game engine, the work stages a society of autonomous characters whose speech, alliances, and conflicts evolve continuously through their interactions.

Inspired by the political and narrative structures of Mughal miniature painting, the project reimagines historical record as a living simulation. Rather than presenting history as fixed text, it models how narratives are produced, manipulated, and destabilized over time. Characters negotiate status, propagate rumors, form coalitions, and shift allegiances, generating emergent storylines that unfold differently with each performance.

The work builds on the artist’s prior research into intimate AI simulations in Conflicts (2024), where interpersonal dynamics between the artist and his former romantic partners were explored through AI agents. Where Conflicts examined empathy within personal relationships, The Game of Whispers explores how distributed artificial agents influence truth at a societal scale.

Technically, the project integrates multi-agent orchestration, real-time language model inference, embodied avatars, and spatialized multi-channel audiovisual output. The work leverages AI as a tool, but also as the artistic form: a behavioral actor embedded within a social system that both generates and critiques its own structures.

In an era shaped by algorithmic amplification, synthetic media, and destabilized public discourse, The Game of Whispers proposes simulation as a way of understanding information ecologies. By making systems of narrative manipulation perceptible and experiential, the work invites audiences to confront how truth is negotiated when intelligence itself becomes programmable.

Created by Parag K. Mital
Technical development: The Garden in the Machine, Inc. 
Collaborators: Breanna Browning, Arturo Castro, Seth Rosetter, Jacobo Heredia Zurita, Ruipeng Wang, Sanaya Ardeshir, Krishna Jhaveri, Udit Duseja, Maria Kuraeva 

Commissioned by LACMA and supported by Joel Ferree with additional help from LACMA's curatorial team. Additional funding from The Garden in the Machine, Inc.
Premiered at Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India in December 2024 with production support by the Serendipity Arts Festival

Parag K. Mital (US) is an artist and technologist whose work explores multi-agent systems, embodied simulations, and emergent narrative practices through real-time audiovisual installations. His practice builds living systems within video game engines, where audiences encounter AI-driven characters shaped by real-world social dynamics. Since 2023, he has developed a bespoke technological framework for creating emergent narratives and autonomous social simulations within interactive media.

A multi-player game occupied only by non-playable characters that inhabit and interact within a fascinating and technically sublime world. Each character is operated by an AI agent attempting to achieve their individual goals by spreading misinformation. The work takes place in the Red Fort at the peak of the Mughal empire during a crisis of succession, where several princes with differing worldviews fight for the future control and ideology of India. To create this rich and historically grounded environment, Parag generated thousands of game assets mixed with materials from LACMA’s archive. Just as ancient civilizations wrote dramas about the relationships between constellations to help them navigate the seas and deserts, this story unfolds like a television drama, giving us a way of understanding non-human agency and their ability to deceive, scam, and manipulate.