Selected Works
by Sougwen Chung
BIOGRAPHY
SELECTED WORKS
BIOGRAPHY
Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned artist and researcher exploring the boundaries of collaboration between human and machine.
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.
PROJECT
Drawing Operations Unit:
Generation 2: Memory
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
distance (in place)
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
Gestures of Becoming-With
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
Indeterminacy Scores
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.1
2020, Mixed Media, 19in x 24in
Ecologies of Becoming-With
WORK ON PAPER
Indeterminacy Score Op.2
2020, Mixed Media, 19in x 24in
Ecologies of Becoming-With
WORK ON PAPER
Indeterminacy Score Op.3
2020, Mixed Media, 19in x 24in
Ecologies of Becoming-With
PROJECT
BiHua 比划
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
Into The Light
A series in collaboration with Yoyo Ma.
The 3-dimensional drawings compose scenes inspired by manifold interpretations of light; as natural phenomena, bodily meridians and cosmic microwave background, a remnant of the earliest light of the universe.
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 1
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 2
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 3
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 4
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 5
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
WORK ON PAPER
Into The Light, Blueprint 6
Painting for AR Installation
Collaboration with Yoyo Ma
2018
PROJECT
Hylomorphism Series
PROJECT
Omnia per Omnia
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
Drawing Operations
Unit: Generation 1
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
Preparatory Gestures
PROJECT
Étude Op. 2
PROJECT
Étude Op. 1, No. 1-4
愫君
愫君
愫君
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a
Chinese-born, Canadian-raised
artist & (re)searcher
based in New York.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in New York.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in New York.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in New York.
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