Artist Ian Cheng's mindfulness app cum video game, 'Bad Corgi' asks users to stop resisting stress and anxiety and instead accept that they are a part of life.

For it’s second digital commission of 2016, London’s Serpentine Galleries commissioned New York Based digital artist Ian Cheng (formerly of George Lucas’s Special Effects company Industrial Light and Magic) to produce a mindfulness app that furthered the gallery website's ambition to become a forward thinking space for exhibiting art.

The resultant app, Bad Corgi, allows users to control a “dwarfish demon pup” whose duty is to herd sheep around a continually unstable environment. The corgi avatar's task is in fact a Sisyphean one, as no matter how careful its actions, the disorder of the ecosystem in which it exists will ensure that any points accumulated are unavoidably lost.

The real benefits of the game therefore, lie not in successful ‘completion’, but beyond the virtual world. Through the apps programmed ructions, users are subconsciously being challenged to learn how to manage the anxiety and frustration we must all cope with on a daily basis.