'Something Thinking of You' is a performative allegory concerning the relation between consciousness and intelligence.

Since the modern Enlightenment at the latest, the distinctiveness of the human being as opposed to other creatures is founded on his intelligence - the capacity to think, recognise, perceive and differentiate between things. Cheng's simulation 'Something Thinking of You' argues, by contrast, that technology now also has the ability to make decisions of its own. In addition, it addresses the topic of the conscious human mind as the result of an evolutionary process lasting millions of years and hence not to be understood as something primordially human. In a free adaption of the book 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral mind' by the psychologist Julian Jaynes (1978), Ian Cheng has produced an experiment examining the boundaries of intellect. Jaynes advanced the hypothesis that human beings formerly did not have a reflective consciousness but experienced vocal hallucinations instead. These are comprehended as voices of authority and were obeyed. Deferring to the instructions of such voices meant delegating the responsibility for one's decisions, which led to easing the burdens of the psyche. As life's realities grew more complicated over time, this mental system could no longer withstand stressful situations and the ensuing collapse led to the formation of a consciousness and an ego that took responsibility for itself.

Ian Cheng takes up this chain of thought in his simulation 'Something Thinking of You' in which an organism undertakes a walk into the unknown. Partly pre-programmed according to a screenplay, the work is a live simulation that generates anew at each time it is shown, it puts the comprehensive faculty of these agents as well as the underlying software to the test. In story lines that never repeat themselves, 'Something Thinking of You' allows the viewer to observe how the behaviour of them and their relationship to each other changes. Will the system break down here and lead to the emergence of a new type of cognition? What is still considered to be the subject here, what is considered human and what living?