💙 Grateful to the whole team at @TIME for the #TIME100 Impact Award, recognizing individuals who have gone above and beyond to move their industries—and the world—forward in the AI space. I am honored to be one of these four recipients.
It's been a surreal few days, so many reflections and images to share, but first:
I took some time to reflect on the moment for my acceptance speech, excerpted below.
Sougwen Chung
"I’m inspired by Grace Lee Boggs who wrote that these are the times to grow our souls. She believed that creativity is vital in producing the necessary conditions not just for our survival, but for our evolution. Her words, and Grace’s life as an Asian-american philosopher and activist, are a testament to hybridity – hybridity of culture and of thought. Her authorship, the works of my peers, and the creative energy of the new generation continue to challenge and inspire me everyday.
I have learned that traditional forms of creativity must shape, but not be replaced by, technological development. That building our own tools and AI systems can help us sit with the existential questions posed by new technologies – A way that fear and hope can be held in the mind at the same time. We’ve observed the damage to our planet done by unchecked technological growth – the damage to our creative industries, too. We need now, more than ever, approaches that foreground hybrid creative innovation to help shape the development of the technology that shapes us, while stewarding what came before.
Sougwen Chung
This award is a spotlight on the meaning made by the artists of today, the artists that came before, and the ones to come. We carry with us the knowledge that exploring the human condition despite the odds, shapes the world in vital and profound ways.
We urge you to move beyond the binary – of thinking and of making and being – and to create the third path with us – To explore the in-between; as a space of imagination and hybridity.
I’ve been thinking about this question — the line between machines and human creativity — for a long time. In my art, lines are governing elements over images. But what happens when those lines are made by a machine?
In 2015, I began my journey in co-creation. It took two years to meticulously scan more than 20 years’ worth of my drawings into a system I developed to train a recurrent neural network. The neural network drives the movements of D.O.U.G., short for Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2, a robot I built to draw with me. We made our debut in 2017. Today, I’m continuing to explore emerging technology — biosensors, computer vision, virtual reality and custom machines. It’s been nearly a decade. I wonder, with all these technological adaptations, what will become of the human hand?
Sougwen Chung’s “gaussian splatting” approach produces an image that is both painterly and ghostly, as seen in “Process Study - Structure from Motion.”Credit...Courtesy of Sougwen Chung
In the years since the Covid-19 pandemic, I’ve seen colleagues close their artistic practices out of disillusionment or pragmatism, often a combination of both. Yet, because of the proliferation of the digital art market of nonfungible tokens, cryptocurrency and generative artificial intelligence systems — technology that can produce images — I’ve seen the igniting of a new generation of digital artists, and witnessed new studios emerge and flourish.
It’s a strange time to make art. In 2023, industries were in revolt — from the 148-day screenwriters strike in the United States to artists rightfully condemning the use of A.I. training data without their consent. It’s not news that researchers have cautioned against the dangers of bias in A.I.; that almost seems a given. Another problem is that not everyone knows the hidden cost of accumulating the data involved in making sense of massive language models like OpenAI’s GPT-4. At the same time, linking prompts with image generation and coding has popularized a new relationship between text and image. Now more people than ever can communicate through a visual medium, a new entry point for learning to code. ChatGPT can function as a sidekick you can talk to, which can help build a sense of rapport between A.I. systems and humans.
With all the hype, it’s easy to forget that there’s no such thing as a single artificial intelligence because there’s no such thing as a single natural intelligence. I’ve come to think of my approach of learning through systems — deemed intelligent or otherwise — as a creative catalyst. There is meaning in the data, but it’s not the meaning we are given; it’s the meaning we make.
Sougwen Chung‘s digital painting “Pulse Sediments (Ground Truths Series).” Credit...Courtesy of Sougwen Chung
For me, meaning-making and experimentation go hand-in-hand. In “Process Study - Structure from Motion,” I’m experimenting with a new way of capturing an environment. The technique is called “gaussian splatting,” a diffuse scanning approach to 3-D space. It gleans structure from motion, yielding a dense representation of objects that, to my eyes, also yields painterly and ghostly visual artifacts. I’m drawn to this approach because of its future possibilities — new applications of Embodied A.I. — as well as its effect in the present day. It shows the incompleteness of digital representation and the texture of the system as its own kind of beauty.
The themes of beauty and fragility ground my experimentations, often involving the sharing of the time and space of making art with machines. I’ve chronicled that evolution through performances, films and vignettes from my studio.For me, drawing is a way of being in the world. When I draw and create with my machines, this creative process allows me to engage with the technology alongside my physical instincts to form a kind of gestural relation. Showing the process in progress offers space for introspection.
I’ve recently finished the fifth generation of my robotic journey. Still, I feel like we’re just getting started with this type of art and our understanding of the role of technology in art. From mimicry, to memory, to the collectivity of the urban environment, to the spectrality of biofeedback, each generation unlocks a new set of technical skills, creating stronger relationships between humans and machines. With each development, I find myself with more questions than answers.
A robot that Sougwen Chung built assists with creating a piece.Credit...Photo by Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post via Getty Images
As I paint in collaboration with the robotic units in my studio, I’m hopeful that some of those tensions make their way into the painted line, the visual artifact on canvas. When people react to my work, I am often asked, “Can A.I. be creative?” But lately, I’m unsure if that’s the question we should be asking.
Artists have the privilege of responding to the social and political moments of their day. I’ve been designing alternative forms of machines inspired by nature, with the bond between humans and machines as one of ecological stewardship. As I develop these forthcoming configurations, the drawn line is one constant that always remains at the center. It is a line that explores the potential of human and machine collaboration, speculating on how the machine will act as a catalyst, co-pilot and companion. If I’ve learned anything in the past decade of this journey, it’s that art can help us ask better questions: Can fear and hope be held in the mind simultaneously? How do we grasp the promise, perils and paranoias of technical shifts at once?
Where does A.I. end and we begin?
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and the founder and artistic director of Scilicet, a London-based studio that works on examining human collaboration with machines.
Since the COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the art market’s transition to remote sales, collectors have warmed to tools like augmented reality simulators and online viewing rooms—or simply high-resolution imagery—to help them view and acquire works from afar.
Among the most recent technological developments to shake up the digital art world is AI. Artificial intelligence tools, from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to image generators like DALL-E, have the power to synthesize enormous amounts of data, automate some rote tasks, and even draw upon existing information in the public domain to create new expressions of digital “art” and text.
Some artists such as Sougwen Chung and Anna Ridler have incorporated AI into their artistic practice, and for those in the commercial art world, mainstream AI-powered productivity tools are already being harnessed. Artsy spoke to a cross-section of the art market, including gallerists, advisors, auction houses, and entrepreneurs, to find out how they believe AI will impact buying activity in the market.
Since 2015, artist Sougwen Chung has pioneered the use of AI and robotics in their work, producing a series of artworks built on the principle of “human-machine collaboration.”
A new exhibition at London’s House of Fine Art (HOFA) gallery, “Relational Gestures,” showcases work from Chung’s recent career, including their iconic paintings produced using robotic arms, AI models trained on their previous body of work, and biofeedback trackers.
“I think I’m always looking to the future, really,” Chung told Decrypt’s SCENE at HOFA. “I don't know if that sounds a bit cheesy!”
A former fellow of MIT Media Lab and Google Artist in Residence, Chung was recently named as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in AI.
Sougwen Chung artwork at HOFA. Image: HOFA
Chung’s practice has evolved with developments in robotics and AI, they explained. “I typically find something that I'm interested in,” Chung said. “Obviously, meditation and biofeedback [are] sort of the focus of this painting series. Prior to that it was open flow and the movement of cities; prior to that it was the current neural networks.”
Throughout their career, Chung has worked alongside DOUG (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation ___), an evolving series of AI-powered robots. The first generation of DOUG used robot arms that attempted to duplicate the artist’s pen strokes, relying on the robot’s limitations to produce spontaneous effects.
Sougwen Chung artwork at HOFA. Image: HOFA
“I think in the very beginning, something that motivated the practice was speculating at the beauty of a non-human move,” they said, referencing Go player Lee Sedol’s quote after his defeat by the deep learning program AlphaGo. “I really loved that, because it meant that his engagement—even through defeat—with his digital opponent meant that he was broadening his internal model of what was possible within the game and what was possible within how he saw beauty,” Chung said.
The more recent works featured in the exhibition highlight Chung’s interest in “new human-machine configurations that are connected to biofeedback.”
To create these works, the artist uses an EEG headset that tracks their brainwaves as they meditate; their robotic “assistants” then respond to these biofeedback signals, tracing patterns with paintbrushes alongside Chung’s own brushstrokes.
Also included in the exhibition are a series of works in which the artist “paints” in virtual reality, with the resulting patterns printed onto aluminum discs. “I’ve been thinking about gesture quite deeply,” Chung said, explaining that they designed a system in VR to “essentially record my drawing sensibility and my brushstrokes, in a way that not only can be brought in and sculpted in virtual reality space, but also printed.”
Upcoming works, Chung added, will include 3D versions cast in aluminum. “It’s also become the basis for a new drawing data set in three dimensions for a forthcoming generation of DOUG.”
Sougwen Chung artwork at HOFA. Image: HOFA
Chung has also founded SCILICET, a studio exploring human and non-human collaboration.
“I've been thinking about human and machine collaboration for quite some time, interpreting that under my own lens, and under my own traditions—thinking, obviously, a lot about drawing and cultural hybridity as a Chinese-Canadian artist,” they said. “But I realized that there are many different types of interpretations of human and machine collaboration,” Chung added, noting that they’ve set up the studio “to support and try to find like minds, who are also bridging tradition and technology in their own way.”
While Chung’s approach to AI focuses on collaboration, the wider art world is wrestling with the implications of the technology. “I do think there are a lot of different ways to look at the relation between ourselves and artificial intelligence, and I'm quite interested in all manners of speculation around it,” Chung said. “I'm actually quite interested personally in exclusively critical work, because I think that has a lot of intellectual rigor and a lot of passion and heart.”
Sougwen Chung artwork at HOFA. Image: HOFA
For their part, Chung hopes that their work “straddles a line between hope and despair, hope and fear, that allows people to sit with it—because I think it can be a very difficult topic. It can be a very existentially uncertain topic and we need spaces and to always broaden the conversation about what that means for humanity.”
“We’ve built systems in a certain way that are always flawed, they're always fragile; they're always brittle, as we are,” Chung added. “I think there are ways to design more just, more fair systems, but we should never assume that any technology is neutral, because it isn't. It's neither good nor bad.”
The Chinese-Canadian artist and artistic director of London-based studio, Scilicet, is renowned for their visionary and speculative practice exploring human-AI collaboration. Sougwen Chung’s forthcoming 2-week show is centred on the idea of hybridity as a relational approach which resolves adversarial perceptions of AI through balance, openness, and imagination.
The ‘Human and Machine’ collaborative hybrid is fundamental to Sougwen Chung’s research-driven practice and the Relational Gestures HOFA exhibition will feature physical paintings and artefacts, digital videos, AR sculptures and immersive media installations that demonstrate this hybridity in subtle and compelling ways. The artist will also offer some of their works as collectible NFTs.
Reflecting on the potential impact of their upcoming show, Sougwen Chung says, "Relational Gestures will showcase a body of artefacts and new works that result from a hybrid process, encouraging the viewer to look beyond screens and flat interfaces to imagine the possible sensory mixes of the future. Through the work I am thinking deeply about how the human hand, how human creative capabilities, might evolve as a direct result of the possibilities afforded by embodied AI."
he 0xCollection (pronounced “Hex Collection”), an initiative of new media and time-based art by contemporary artists at the forefront of innovation, premiers its international exhibition programme in Prague on 8 September 2023 with a new immersive installation from Refik Anadol and a group show from 8 leading digital artists. Founded by Karel Komárek, entrepreneur and philanthropist, 0x is based in Basel under the direction of curator Elle Anastasiou and champions a networked approach to collecting by working with artists, curators, historians and technologists to develop today’s digital art for future generations.
With a decentralised approach to collecting and curating at its core, the collection was created with the purpose of public display and engagement around contemporary artistic and technical innovation. Elle Anastasiou, Director of the 0xCollection, says:
‘As 0x, we have committed ourselves to building a new collection that operates as a living organism — an ecosystem presenting art at the forefront of technological innovation, encouraging active dialogue while preserving the artefacts of today. The primary aim of this Collection is to provide a new media vocabulary for audiences in the now, by honouring both the histories and futures shaping this cultural moment.’
REFIK ANADOL: DVOŘÁK DREAMS 8 – 13 SEPTEMBER 2023
Presented in front of the historic Rudolfinum as part of the renowned annual classical music festival Dvořák Prague, the 0xCollection unveils the latest Machine Hallucination by internationally renowned digital artist Refik Anadol. The newly commissioned large-scale installation harnesses the latest in machine learning and artificial intelligence to commemorate the legacy of Czech composer Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904). DVOŘÁK DREAMS has been developed over the last two years with LA-based artist Refik Anadol, using his signature algorithms trained on original data, music and records from throughout Dvořák ’s life, sourced from within the Czech Republic and abroad. The commission demonstrates 0x’s mission to honour cultural pasts in the present through a radical combination of art and technology, bridging the gap that often separates digital art from the lineage of traditional art history and culture at large.
SYNESTHETIC IMMERSION 7 SEPTEMBER – 19 OCTOBER 2023
Exhibited in the Arts Space at Bořislavka, Synesthetic Immersion highlights the work of 8 new media artists whose creations translate one art form into another through radical interdisciplinary technologies. Exploring synaesthesia (derived from the Greek for ‘united perception’) as a poetic and a neurological state, the artworks demonstrate the transformation of an input perceived by one sense into an output in another. In this hybrid mechanism, a colour can have sound, or an artwork can directly induce sensation.
One of glitch art’s pioneers, Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda is best known for his mathematical, immersive live performances and installations which span visual and sonic media. In Prague, he will present data.gram 14 (2022), a piece from his larger dataverse trilogy which translates 2D sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code into dramatic rotating views of the universe in 3D.
LU YANG – DOKU : HELLO WORLD, 2021 Still from video courtesy of the artist
Chinese-Canadian artist Sougwen Chung specialises in the expanding field of human-machine collaboration, a realm where the interplay between mark-made-by-hand and mark-made-by-machine unveils insights into the dynamics between humans and systems. For the exhibition, she will present works from her ongoing Ligatures series (2021 – 2023) in both screen-based and AR formats, delving into the delicate interplay between traditional sculpture and non-traditional, post-physical architecture through mathematical and gestural translations. QUAYOLA, the multidisciplinary Italian artist who draws inspiration from Hellenistic sculpture, Old Master painting, and Baroque architecture, uses technology to explore the intricate confluence of seemingly contrasting forces. The exhibition sees him display Transient Suite #B (2020): the innovative audiovisual concert which marks a collaborative journey of research and experimentation with experimental musician Seta, as well as QUAYOLA’s first music-based project. Meanwhile, British artist and quantum physicist Libby Heaney crafts an ethereal dreamscape titled Ent-er the Garden of Forking Paths (2022) in one of the first artworks to use future computing as an aesthetic tool. Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s vibrant depictions of heaven and hell in the Garden of Earthly Delights, Heaney invites viewers to transcend the boundaries of perception by using quantum computing to animate alternate states of existence. Collaborating with the Takahashi Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, Japanese artist Daito Manabe’s Cells: A Generation (2023) delves into generative art by harnessing the computational potential of rat brain cells. Developing a mechanism that enables rat neurons to learn and create art based on their environment, the resulting video installation transforms the neural learning process into a visual spectacle akin to human artists working with physical elements like canvas, paint, or stone.
In his sculptural installation series Aoyama Space Nr. 5 (2009), German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai reinterprets the form of a Tokyo photo studio, creating a miniature, concave room devoid of edges to develop an enigmatic spatial conceit. Illumination emanates from electronic harmonies, ranging from deep resonant bass to high-pitched clicks, modulating sound to further spatial speculation. Between a shifting kaleidoscope of shapes and colour, elegant yet elusive hardware, and sonic irritation, this piece stands as a testament to Carsten Nicolai’s practice, which transcends traditional boundaries by embracing the intersection of science, technology, and aesthetics. Nancy Baker Cahill exhibits The Quivering and Lively Nerve of the Now (2023): a film mirroring Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in its celebration of selfhood, desire, and unbridled passion. Building upon the foundation of her recent series, Slipstream: Table of Contents, the American new media artist mediates literature through the realm of digital art by using a phrase from Água Viva as the animating force behind the film’s abstract narrative: ‘I am before, I am almost, I am never’. Lastly, Lu Yang’s DOKU : Hello World (2021) continues the Chinese artist’s exploration of the digital realm. The iconic piece introduced Lu Yang’s alter-ego avatar, Doku – a striking character that transcends the rigid confines of identity, nationality, and gender. In the piece, Lu Yang weaves together virtual reality, gaming subcultures, and popular music, creating an immersive experience that celebrates the liberation of one’s identity in the internet landscape. Full list of participating artists: Ryoji Ikeda, Sougwen Chung, QUAYOLA, Libby Heaney, Daito Manabe, Carsten Nicolai, Nancy Baker Cahill and Lu Yang. The 0xCollection’s opening programme in Prague is kindly sponsored by Allwyn. The partnership builds on Allwyn’s rich heritage of innovation and support for cultural initiatives and young talent.
Singapore International Festival of Arts (Sifa) Realm Of Silk Sougwen Chung Victoria Theatre Saturday (May 20)
With artificial intelligence (AI) sending waves of upheavals in the art world, it is apt that this year’s Sifa – positioning itself at the artistic vanguard – has commissioned a work that offers a mesmerising reply.
Realm Of Silk presents a perspective that defends the human artist without being defensive about human genius.
Four AI-powered robotic arms writhe and write on stage, but they are co-maestros with two other pairs of human hands belonging to Canadian artist Sougwen Chung and Singaporean cellist Leslie Tan.
In 45 engrossing minutes, the audience follows these eight hands as they compose a painting on a flat canvas that is often out of view, inviting one to engage instead with the performers’ bodily gestures.
Dressed in pristine white, Chung leaps elegantly across the circular canvas with a brush in hand while she feeds the robotic arms ink, the way an animal whisperer might extend a bowl of water to a bevy of baby deer.
Canadian artist Sougwen Chung paints with four AI-driven robotic arms in the festival commission, Realm Of Silk. PHOTO: MOONRISE STUDIO
Her tender gestures – such as cupping the “cheeks” of these robots – are visual tricks. They morph the mechanical arms into something animal-like until, at times, they arch uncannily like human wrists.
Canadian-born musician Aquarian’s score is an atmospheric wall of music that sustains itself like a long note through the show, aided by Tan’s flowing legatos.
Tan, with generous sweeps of his bow, goes beyond a musical duet with Chung. The spectacle crescendos into a symphonic movement of arms that fastens the eye.
When a large moon of a mirror descends, the audience gets a distorted glimpse of the canvas. But the abstract curves are not as interesting as the view one gets of the moving arms from an aerial perspective.
But there is more than meets the eye about this collaboration, as Chung reveals in a post-show talk that the headset she dons allows her brainwaves to influence the movement of the robots.
Chung dons a headset that allows her brainwaves to influence the movement of the robots on stage. PHOTO: MOONRISE STUDIO
Although not visible on stage, her work takes an ethical stance towards human-robot collaboration that is antithetical to trending AI software, which is trained on other artists’ content to create something iffily “new”.
Chung, instead, transforms her own neural waves and artworks into the dataset for robotic intervention.
Her emphasis on performing these collaborations in real-time, instead of doggedly pursuing output, slows down any quick judgments on AI art and turns one’s attention to art-making.
Realm Of Silk shows how something utterly beautiful can arise from being all hands on deck, robot or human, without assigning full control to either man or machine.
Since the COVID-19 lockdowns accelerated the art market’s transition to remote sales, collectors have warmed to tools like augmented reality simulators and online viewing rooms—or simply high-resolution imagery—to help them view and acquire works from afar.
Among the most recent technological developments to shake up the digital art world is AI. Artificial intelligence tools, from large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to image generators like DALL-E, have the power to synthesize enormous amounts of data, automate some rote tasks, and even draw upon existing information in the public domain to create new expressions of digital “art” and text.
Some artists such as Sougwen Chung and Anna Ridler have incorporated AI into their artistic practice, and for those in the commercial art world, mainstream AI-powered productivity tools are already being harnessed. Artsy spoke to a cross-section of the art market, including gallerists, advisors, auction houses, and entrepreneurs, to find out how they believe AI will impact buying activity in the market.
In an in-depth article and interview with the V&A Museum's digital art curator Pita Arreola, the topic of collecting contemporary digital art is discussed, with the recent acquisition of Sougwen Chung's work MEMORY, serving as an example of hybrid collecting.
"The same questions come up when collecting contemporary digital art. You see it a lot in the NFT scene, with some people selling live code and others selling screenshots of the running code. At the V&A, the most recent acquisition we’ve finalized is a work entitled MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit Generation 2), 2017–22, by Sougwen Chung, a Chinese-Canadian artist, researcher, and coder. Over the years she has programmed and built a series of AI-driven robots, using recurrent neural networks to “teach” the robots to mimic her own hand-drawn gestures. For Chung, the core of the artwork is the performance of the robot itself. We couldn’t collect the robotic arm used in MEMORY, because it’s still part of her artistic practice, so we had to think about how to acquire the piece in a way that would be meaningful for audiences now and into the future. As a museum, we want to collect works so that people can interact with all aspects of the software and the experience. That’s where hybrid collecting comes in. For MEMORY, we collected a print of a drawing made as part of a performance, a video where the artist explains how she created the work, a model of the neural network, and also a 3D-printed sculpture made using the same neural network."
Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher. Chung is the founder and artistic director of ⇢ SCILICET, a studio exploring human & non-human collaboration.
A former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab, Sougwen is considered a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration – exploring the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in London / New York / Hong Kong.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in London / New York / Hong Kong.
— Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-born, Canadian-raised artist & (re)searcher based in London / New York / Hong Kong.
