Chung's work investigates the interactions between mark-made-by-hand and the mark- made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems.
A former research fellow at MIT, Chung is a pioneer of human and machine collaboration. There, she programmed and built robots named D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit Generation_X).
These machines mimic the artist’s hand-drawn gestures and synchronously draw along with her. The custom robots make marks in a feedback loop with the artist, generating sketches based on neural nets trained on Sougwen’s drawings gestures and biometrics.
Chung's work treats ‘AI’ as a space of, and for, doubt and uncertainty rather than narrowly defined ends, creating works that address separation, merging, and how we inhabit the relations between human, machine and non-human others.
"Every act of mark-making constructs a form to inhabit, a space of rememberance, a document of time / place / state. Gestures suspended, layered, extruding from a single plane. A simultenaity of here and nowhere."
These works explore co-naturality, the poetics of "reciprocity between the technological and natural." Organic forms resembling flowers painted with visualizations of Chung's brainwave data. The artists biometrics generating blueprints for a multi-robotic agricultural network.
PROJECT
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 4, Isloation Drawings created during quarantine lockdown
" At Day 60 of quarantine I felt an acute desire to escape in gesture. Disassociation from the body while feeling space flatten & time extend... First in a series of 7 works-in-progress .Human & machine co-creation during the first quarantine isolation period in Brooklyn, New York"
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 4, Isloation Drawings created during quarantine lockdown
At Day 60 of quarantine I felt an acute desire to escape in gesture.
Disassociation from the body while feeling space flatten & time extend... First in a series of 7 works-in-progress .Human & machine co-creation during the first quarantine isolation period in Brooklyn, New York
PROJECT
An ongoing series exploring machine learning and the artist's hand
Gestures from previous drawings are collected and saved, existing as a memory bank for D.O.U.G._2. Analysis of visual style of historic artists to translate into gesture, as well as colour palette as a collective memory bank from which robotic arm will be able to select.
SELECTED WORKS
PROJECT
Drawings created during quarantine lockdown
In collaboration with D.O.U.G._5
Chung’s practice—having moved far beyond simplifying binaries of real and artificial, human and machine—urges the poetic promise of mechanical and artificial systems to imagine forms of closeness in an increasingly estranged world. A result of the human sensorium through and through, her works double down on the entanglement of all bodies (biological, mechanical, and otherwise), never really disembodied but always becoming. - Claire Voon
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 4, Isloation Drawings created during quarantine lockdown
" At Day 60 of quarantine I felt an acute desire to escape in gesture. Disassociation from the body while feeling space flatten & time extend... First in a series of 7 works-in-progress .Human & machine co-creation during the first quarantine isolation period in Brooklyn, New York "
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 4
Paintings as sound compositions
Referencing John Cage's Fontina Mix, 1958, a provocation for "musical scores of indeterminacy", these experiments were created in collaboration with D.O.U.G._4, with contact mics recording real-time sound feedback on canvas.
WORK ON PAPER
Indeterminacy Score Op.4
2020, Mixed Media, 19in x 24in
Ecologies Of Becoming-With
WORK ON PAPER
Indeterminacy Scores Op.5
2020, Mixed Media, 19in x 24in
Ecologies Of Becoming-With
PROJECT
Exploring ideas in Cosmotechnics through gesture; the Dao of traditional chinese painting techniques re-envisioned in VR
Figural fluid studies. Part of an ongoing project interpreting the 八卦 bāguà trigrams figures in the IChing. “Our senses are currently whip-driven by a feverish new pace of technological change. The activities that mark us as human, though, don’t begin, exist in, or end by such a calculus. They pulse, fade out, and pulse again in human tissue, human nerves, and in the elemental humus of memory, dreams, and art, where there are no bygone eras. They are in us, they can speak to us, they can teach us if we desire it.”
PROJECT
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 3, Live Autonomous System. The project reimagines the tradition of landscape painting as a collaboration between an artist, a robotic swarm, and the dynamic flow of a city.
The work explores the poetics of various modes of sensing: human and machine, organic and synthetic, and improvisational and computational. Through a collaborative drawing performance between Sougwen and a swarm of custom-designed drawing robots, the project explores the composite agency of an human and machine as a speculation on new pluralities.
PROJECT
feat. Drawing Operations (robotic) Unit, Generation 1,
Mimicry Drawings created during live performances
The robot mimics the artist's drawing gesture and vice versa in real time, resulting in a synchronous, interpretive performance. This is the first stage of an ongoing study examining human and robotic interaction as an artistic collaboration.
PROJECT
PROJECT
PROJECT
愫君
愫君
愫君