The Victoria & Albert Museum has acquired my project MEMORY, created with Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 2 (D.O.U.G._2).
MEMORY consists of an RNN (Recurrent Neural Network) model contained within a newly designed and developed 3D-printed sculptural casing, as well as a fine art print. The RNN model is the first artefact of its kind to be acquired by a cultural institution.
The model contains the MEMORY (D.O.U.G. 2) dataset, and is encapsulated in a newly designed and developed 3D-printed sculptural casing, made of clear resin, which deteriorates over time, much like data.
Read the interview with me by Katherine Mitchell on the @vamuseum blog
Among the questionable uses of AI models I'm pleased to be able to chart a path with the support of @vamuseum, MEMORY (w D.O.U.G._2) being the first AI model to be collected by a major institution.
Foregrounding the evolution of the artists hand and recognizing the necessity of balance between technology and tradition in all fields, especially arts and culture.
Thank you to @carlajrapo@lumen_prize, Melanie Lenz and Pita Arreola for supporting the practice and recognizing the work of artists in this still-emerging field.
DeepDream, BIG, *airegan. The list of artists and designers included in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s latest exhibition, The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, features names that sound as futuristic and tech-centric as the show itself. Yet, one of the joys of this show, on until Oct. 23, is how far back in time the curators reached for their exploration of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on the imagery we now consume.
‘Entangled Origins’ is a new, progressive exhibition from award winning artist Sougwen Chung, taking place during Frieze Week with Gillian Jason Gallery at Asia House, 12th-17th October. Sougwen Chung is an internationally renowned artist and researcher exploring the relationship 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.
This groundbreaking exhibition is the first time that Chung will present her ever evolving connections between artificial intelligence and art through a combination of painting, sculpture, video and performance.Chung aims to flip our relationship with artificial intelligence on its head in to explore the way in which ‘human artist’ and ‘machine artist’ can collaborate to create something extraordinary.
Through Chung’s performances with self-programmed robots, her ‘duets’ portray the human element of robotics, entangling the artist’s and the machine’s mark-making through the use of algorithms, brainwave sensors, and augmented reality. Chung’s pioneering technologies imagine forms of closeness with robotics in an increasingly estranged world.
Her speculative critical practice spans performance, installation, and drawings which have been featured in numerous exhibitions at museums and galleries around the world. For over 20 years, Chung has designed and programmed dozens of robots, each called D.O.U.G (Drawing Operations Unit, Generation X).
The structures are as much the artwork, as they are the creators. The latest DOUG is connected to Chung’s brain-wave data toinfluence how the robot behaves and responds to her, thus creating a greater intimate connection. When they paint together, artist and robot are linked through a shared bank of knowledge, and in the moment of creating together, the two are seamlessly synchronised, just like dancers or musicians. And this is evident in ‘Entangled Origins’.
“Science transforms its languages; Poetry invents its tongues.”
Thank you to Falling Walls for the award of winner in the category of Science in the Arts for my contributions to the field of Art + Research practice.
I’d like to dedicate the award to my parents, who taught me about hybridity through example. My mother’s technical mindedness as a computer programmer and my father’s musical and artistic sensibilities as an opera singer, showed me the complementary possibilities of both ways of approaching the world.
Hybridity rejects false binaries. I believe that by engaging practices that ~ connect ~ scientific and cultural fields, we’re able to better adapt to the rapidly changing conditions of living on an interconnected, damaged planet. And hopefully change it for the better.
While developing my own art and research practice for the past decade, I’ve seen the value of moving beyond the seeming contradictions of science in the arts; of seeing them as obstacles, But instead as unique sites for invention, growth, and transformation.
Thank you again to Falling Walls for this recognition. I’m looking forward to sharing much more of this continuing journey with you all this coming year.
NEW YORK — Sougwen Chung looks down at her silent, stubborn collaborator with a mix of affection and mild vexation.
“I need to debug the unit,” says the 35-year-old artist. “It won’t cooperate with me today.” She strokes the silver-and-white contraption as if she’s soothing a child. Clearly, it is more to her than a “unit.” It’s a robotic arm that paints, powered by artificial intelligence.
Meet Doug. Full name: Drawing Operations Unit, Generation Four. Chung uses it and other robots in her performance-based artworks. She and the robots paint together on large canvasses, part team effort, part improvised dance.
In pre-coronavirus days, Chung led these AI-assisted painting performances in front of a live audience, on a stage or in a gallery setting. At London’s Gillian Jason Gallery, a series of four of Chung’s robot collaborations is priced at 100,000 pounds, or more than $131,000, per image.
Yet with the pandemic, Chung is no longer performing live. She streams her robot collaborations from her studio into exhibit spaces — in August, the Sorlandets Kunstmuseum in Norway hosted several of these transmissions, where they became temporary video installations.
Chung has carved out her niche in the expanding world of AI art. Much of this world is focused on the digital side: graphics, pixels, software. But Chung’s work is different. She’s interested in a human-machine partnership, and what that feels like in the body.
“I’m interested in the physical world as well as digital,” she says, “not so much an emphasis on pixel manipulation. How these systems can feed back into our everyday lives, and in muscle memory and physical space.”
This is why she likes people to see how she and the robots paint together. She calls her work “embodied AI,” and it’s her body she’s talking about — bending or kneeling, wielding her brush on the canvas with her robots, responding to their movements as they respond to hers.
I was interested in the physical embodiment, and what it would feel like to evolve my own drawing practice, and I hadn’t seen robots used collaboratively at that time.
Sougwen Chung
Chung has designed and programmed about two dozen Dougs, at a cost of up to $8,000 per unit. She uploaded the early ones with 20 years worth of her drawings, making them experts in her gestures. Doug 4 is even more intimately tied to Chung: It connects to her brain-wave data, and this influences how the robot behaves. When she and her robots paint, they are closely linked through a shared bank of knowledge, and through live, in-the-moment visual and movement cues, just as dancers or musicians are.
In Chung’s Brooklyn studio, Doug’s arm bends over a sheet of paper on a table, with its front tip poised just above the surface, ready to be fitted with a brush. Smooth and organic-looking, this Doug could be taken for a biomorphic sculpture. You could say it’s both art object and art maker.
Paintings that Chung has created with AI systems hang on the sun-washed walls of her studio: spiraling clouds of blue and white; tendrils that spring forth and recede; fluid lines worming together in an undulating web. Some recall thick-inked calligraphy, the jottings of a secret language.
They look like the work of a single artist. But are they? That depends on how you think about AI. It’s a term that even Chung hesitates to embrace.
When Sougwen Chung and her robots paint, they are closely linked through a shared bank of knowledge, and through live, in-the-moment visual and movement cues. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Sougwen Chung has designed and programmed about two dozen Dougs, at a cost of up to $8,000 per unit. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
“We don’t have human intelligence figured out,” she says. “That lack of specificity is not the best way to think about a complex set of systems.”
She prefers to call her robots collaborators. They don’t fully replicate the human creative process, of course, but neither are they simply spitting out copies of the data Chung feeds them.
Instead, they can generate interpretations — for example, expanding upon a data set of Chung’s drawings to make their own designs. They can also respond spontaneously to Chung’s lines and brushstrokes, creating a feedback loop with her of improvised, communal creation.
Chung made the paintings on her walls with mobile Dougs, Generations Two and Three, that scoot around on wheels with their brushes, trailing paint. (First, she had to figure out how to keep their wheels from slipping on it.) Many of these floor-based units rest on shelves and tables around the studio. They’re round and Roomba-size, topped with coiled wires, small motors and a compact computer device known as a Raspberry Pi. Built into the front of each one is a short, stiff chalk brush, like a shaving brush.
Dressed all in black — snug T-shirt, Harem pants — Chung looks more like a dancer than a techie, with her slender physique and expressive, delicate hands. She worries about sounding “too much like a nerd” as she points out the robots’ features.
Although she speaks softly and has a calm demeanor, Chung is a bit of an adrenaline junkie. She’s okay with chaos, happy to throw control to the winds. Why else would she choose this path, turning away from safe, contemplative work in her studio to build a career out of risky group projects in public view, with unpredictable algorithms and glitch-prone, high-maintenance machines (looking at you, robotic-arm Doug) that require constant calibrations?
For Chung, perseverance while dealing with technical glitches is nothing new. She grew up at the intersection of art and technology; her father was an opera singer and her mother a computer programmer. Born in Hong Kong, they emigrated to Toronto, where Chung was born. She studied violin, taught herself to code and began designing websites in grade school.
She was also fond of drawing, though back then she didn’t envision a career as an artist. Still, she liked her work enough to hang on to her early sketches, and to everything since. (This is a highly organized person.)
“The drawing practice,” she says, “is something I’ve always kept with me, my whole life.”
It was during a research fellowship at MIT Media Lab that Chung discovered robotics. Here was a way to bridge science and art, and build on her sketching.
“I was interested in the physical embodiment, and what it would feel like to evolve my own drawing practice,” she says, “and I hadn’t seen robots used collaboratively at that time. I wanted to try something less about robots executing an existing code and more about working together.”
In 2014, she launched the machine collaborations that eventually included AI. “It was just this strange experiment,” Chung says, thinking back on the first AI system she built and coded. “What would it be like to have a drawing collaborator that was a nonhuman machine entity? What would that do for my process?”
It sounds like a logical progression — from child artist and coder to professional artist building her own robots. Yet Chung says none of this seemed very clear as she was feeling her way into this new realm.
Sougwen Chung says she prefers to call her robots collaborators. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
“I stumbled into my path,” she says. What pushed her forward wasn’t so much the technology, fascinating as it was, but the rush of performance. That’s what she had loved about playing violin as a child.
“I wanted to bring the body back into the creative process, the muscle memory and gesture that were missing from my practice, and that energy you create with the audience.”
Maya Indira Ganesh, a technology researcher at Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany, says Chung’s work stands out because she rejects prevailing notions of robots and AI, and she’s comfortable with her own fallibility.
“What Sougwen does is say, ‘How do we reimagine these boundaries and differences that are supposed to exist between humans and machines?’” Ganesh says, speaking by phone from Berlin. In galleries, “most of the AI art you see is usually simple and straightforward, like watching computation happen. It’s the fetishization of the machine. We think these systems should be perfect and seamless. But Sougwen is very skilled with this technology, and she talks about her works in progress and in process. … She’s showing us that the human is very much a part of the process.”
The modern human is surrounded by smart technology and phones and machines, and I want to use them as a source of inspiration, looking to what future art practices could be.
Sougwen Chung
The process. Think experimental theater. Typically, Chung and Doug perform in a darkened gallery space, with spectators (pre-pandemic) gathered around a canvas illuminated on the floor. There’s often music and atmospheric lighting, and the robot is sort of crawling around.
“Painting, painting,” says Chung, delivering a firm correction with a smile.
Of course. It’s painting. (One of the Dougs, perched beside Chung’s laptop as we watch videos of her performances, still has dried blue and white paint stuck to its little brush.) Doug dashes off gleaming streaks of color, and Chung counters with her own, and so on, artist and machine taking turns reading each other’s painted expressions and building on them. The robot is guided by an AI system known as recurrent neural networks.
“It’s more of a call-and-response,” Chung says. “I can input different line strokes and the machine can respond to it. So it’s really about that interaction. But it’s also not about making machines do a thing. You know what I mean? It’s always about that feedback loop in that collaboration.”
Sougwen Chung paints in her Brooklyn studio. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Interaction. Collaboration. Chung’s language reveals how she thinks about AI. It’s not her slave. She’s not always the boss.
“I think a lot about narratives that we tell ourselves about technology and why we have those narratives,” she says. “And I think they’re really influenced by science fiction and pop culture. And that tends to be hypermasculine, hyper-dystopian. That’s why we have all these really sensational stories about AI, like, is it going to take over humanity? Where do we get that from? We get that from ‘The Matrix.’
“That’s not a narrative that I subscribe to,” she continues. “I think it creates a very adversarial, power-driven dynamic with technology.”
In the performances, everything comes together: Her tech expertise, her art, the full-body experience. After all the programming and calibrating, it is through these improvised painting experiences with her AI collaborators that Chung has regained the flow state she loved as a musician.
“Where you don’t have to think about commas in your code,” she says, “but you can just be in it. … There was this sense of exploration and wonder that I was navigating. It felt very vital and alive, like dance.”
Her work continues to evolve. In a recent project, she uploaded her robots with publicly available surveillance footage of pedestrians crossing New York City streets. She extracted specific data streams, to capture the physical motion of pre-coronavirus New York crowds. With the robots, she turned this digitized bustle into brushwork. In future projects, Chung hopes to bring the public into her process and even onto her canvas, to draw alongside the robots.
“I’m curious about exploring what the machine would draw like,” she says, “if we all contributed to a drawing set.”
Ultimately, Chung wants to use AI technologies to bring people together. Yet now that the coronavirus has us all practicing social distancing, she sees other opportunities: ways for viewers to experience AI art-making remotely, such as the streamed performances.
“Picasso used the tools of his day,” she says. “I’m interested in using the technologies that define our current moment, as a way of understanding how they work in our lives. The modern human is surrounded by smart technology and phones and machines, and I want to use them as a source of inspiration, looking to what future art practices could be.”
“There’s always a potential for failure,” Chung says. “With this dynamic that I’ve been exploring, it’s about the unexpected. And that keeps me really interested.”
“Picasso used the tools of his day,” Sougwen Chung says. “I’m interested in using the technologies that define our current moment, as a way of understanding how they work in our lives." (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Exploring ideas of authorship and agency in a future where technology is embedded in our culture, Chinese-Canadian artist Chung shares her thoughts and tells us about her practice.
It’s a strange feeling to contemplate the idea of peace during a time when a global pandemic has overtaken our very existence. As we celebrate the internationally declared day dedicated towards peace, we are compelled to examine what the word really means to us. Is there anything left to celebrate? The word ‘peace' instantly makes me think about war, an internalised dichotomy. War takes on many forms today. War for territory, war for resources, war for control. While on a macro scale these battles pit countries against each other, if you look around, they also pit neighbours against one another. However, war is not only waged amongst humans. The current crisis invites us to think about our strained relationship with our natural environment, and our role in the destabilisation of smaller ecological systems that are key to the maintenance of balance in our natural environment. However, as the Earth turns on its axis, a slow but significant change simmers under the surface. One which engages us in a new worldview - one where we walk side by side, arm in arm with artificially intelligent beings. As our relationship with technology grows more intimate, intricate and intrinsic, we look into the future and gauge how that relationship might have significant influence on our understanding of peace and harmony, going forward. We speak to artist and researcher Sougwen Chung who works in close proximity with robots to understand the implications of such relationships.
F.R.A.N. explores floral and machine co-naturalityImage: Sougwen Chung
For many years Chung has been working with D.O.U.G., an artificial intelligence driven robot, as her creative collaborator. She tells us, “D.O.U.G. is an acronym for Drawing Operations Unit: Generation X. It traces an ongoing investigation into collaborative drawing with robotic forms and synthetic intelligences. Each generation is an investigation of an approach to computational co-creation utilising emerging technologies. The generations engage computer vision, deep learning, electroencephalogram (EEG) readings, expanding in scope and defining the space of human and machine creativity. Through the work I have arrived at various insights, testing research methodologies through embodied and empirical investigation. The work in progress becomes a mirror of movement when engaging with mimicry (generation 1), a window into the shadow self, in a Jungian sense, when engaging with personal data (generation 2), and an interactive kinetic sculptural form expanding my sense perception, or Umwelt, with a multi-robotic system linked to the flow of the city (generation 3). Not only has the focus on embodied feedback loops and self-assembled data helped me grow as an artist and engineer, but it has led to a more dynamic contemplation about the art form of synthesising human and non-human approaches.
Exquisite Corpus is a performance installation exploring the feedback loop between bodiesImage: Sougwen Chung
Chinese-Canadian artist Chung, who currently lives and works in Basel, Switzerland, negotiates her own work and subjects of authorship and agency as she re-imagines our relationships with robot beings, “I was watching a documentary on the activist Grace Lee Boggs the other day, and an excerpt from it really resonated with me. At 99, Grace says “There are times when expanding our imaginations is what is required.” I linger at that sentiment because I believe our imagination, by and large, is about what ‘AI’ is and what it requires is re-evaluation and re-engagement. We are able to see personal relationships as human animals easier because that’s what we are used to. But the encounter between humans and AI systems traverse the personal, social, and political. What I investigate with the D.O.U.G. project is the question of authorship in collaborative machine frameworks, but also one that is not merely functional but contributes to the mutual development of the human and non-human subject through iterative, empirical sensibilities. While one could say the work is speculative in nature, the project is grounded in and implicated by the technological capabilities of the current moment. How can we invent new interaction models that expand one’s conception of creativity?”. She goes on to say, “Under the framework of collaboration I am reminded of the history of technological development in various cultural histories through Yuk Hui’s research in cosmotechnics. Advancement of technology has driven much of how societies are shaped. At the moment the majority of what we see as AI and digital technology have emerged from the western world. That in and of itself constructs an unnecessary limitation to the imagination, as those technological systems have amplified western values. The future of our relationships with AI is one in which the assertion of agency is necessary for our survival as species. I submit that art, philosophy, and the humanities play a vital role in the examination of the role of the AI systems of the future”.
Exquisite Corpus was performed in Mexico City in 2019Image: Sougwen Chung
Chung goes on to contemplate the role of the artist in a future world in which machine and technology are culturally embedded, “Art can help shape the technology that shapes us. Through my Drawing Operations project, I have been able to shape my own artistic sensibility with my art practice through robotic engineering and machine learning. That being said, there’s a lot to unpack in the question of ‘technological intervention’ and ‘peace and harmony’ of the human world. One could argue that the human world is hardly peaceful and harmonious by default, and technological systems that produce automation to scale create convenience and a reduction of the labour needed to gather resources for human survival. At the same time, machine automation supporting unregulated industrialisation contributes to an unrealistic view of resources and a general imbalance in the world. The reality is undoubtedly more complex than denotes simple binaries or value assessments. It’s a topic with many points of views, perspectives and histories. For the purposes of time I can speak to the role of artists in responding to and shaping the zeitgeist, the cultural moment in which she inhabits. I am interested in the idea of artistic interventions as prescience, as foreshadowing, particularly in the realm of arts and science. An art practice has the capacity to explore manifestations of the subconscious through technological mediums. The Black Box, perhaps, of the conscious mind. In this way, the artistic practice becomes a mechanism through which artefacts of speculation and contemplation are manifested for society to look inward and regard itself in a medium specific way. Artistic explorations define perimeters of technological mediums. For traditional technologies like painting, the art form traces of way of seeing within the limitations the static limitations of paint. For interactive technologies there is the promise of development through the act of making and the accumulation of data which can be read statistically. Through this feedback loop, the ways of seeing are depicted but also constructed. I find this particularly engaging as an ‘artistic intervention’ as it has potential to create new non-institutional knowledge and structures for understanding the self and its relationship to and construction of ‘world’.”
A portrait of the artist Sougwen ChungImage: Sougwen Chung
While Chung’s oeuvre is fairly consistent to the point of repetition in both aesthetic and palette, her conceptual exploration is where the intrigue lies. While this might make her research and ideas a bit distant for the viewer, and slightly out of reach for those not well versed in the lexicon of Chung’s thought processes, these experiments hold the key to our future relationships with artificially intelligent machinery.
Published Wednesday 8 May 2019 - 10:58 AM Harsh Biyani
150 guests gathered on Saturday night at the Oceanographic Museum to pay tribute to the work of three women who dedicate their lives between art and science.
She always sees bigger, always more beautiful! Cinzia Sgambati-Colman, president and founder of the “Woman of the Year, Monte Carlo Award”, organized the 8th edition of her annual event on Saturday night at the Oceanographic Museum.
And for this 2019 edition, the theme chosen was “Art & Science”, inspired on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci. During the evening, sponsored by the Walgreens Boots Alliance, the public discovered the three women who received the awards. It is Sougwen Chung (Chinese-Canadian) Monte-Carlo Award “Woman of the Year” 2019; Elena Rossoni-Notter (Monegasque) Prix Monte-Carlo “Woman of the Year” – Monaco; Special award for her entire career in Orlan (French).
Prince Albert II met with the laureates who told him about their career, alongside Cinzia Sgambati-Colman and Ornella Barra, co-chief operating officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance.
Sougwen Chung won the Monte-Carlo Woman of the Year Award in 2019 for her artistic work. Multimedia artist of Chinese origin, who grew up in Canada and lives in New York. She has been working with robots since 2015, exploring the links between “handmade” and design machines, to understand the relationship between humans and computers. Chung is an artist-in-residence at Google and in the cultural incubator at New Museum, New Inc. and a former academic researcher at MIT Media Lab. In 2017, she was one of three artists selected to participate in a new partnership between Nokia Bell Labs and New Inc. to support artists working with emerging technologies.
Elena Rossoni-Notter, Director of the Museum of Prehistoric Archeology of Monaco, received the Monte-Carlo Woman of the Year Award – Monaco, for her commitment, tenacity, research, discovery and dissemination of archaeological research on the territory of Monaco. Elena Rossini-Notter started working at the museum in 2014 as an archaeologist. She made several excavations in Monaco. She was appointed Director of the Museum in April 2018.
Orlan received the Monte-Carlo Award “Woman of the Year” – special award for her career. Avant-garde, a pioneer in the field of art, science and technology, the artist uses her body as a creative material and source of inspiration. Operated, scanned, remodelled in 3D, virtualized, this body questions, provokes. With a French robotics company, Orlan has designed a robot in her image: Orlanoïde.
Artist Sougwen Chung discusses the joys and complications of working with robotics, the evolving definition of what it means to be an interdisciplinary artist, and creating space for other people to explore.
KT: How did you get into art?
SC: I got into art through music; my father was an opera singer, so I grew up in a household that had a deep appreciation for the musical arts. I played the violin from an early age, which became a big part of my creative wayfinding. As a quiet child there were a lot of things I wanted to express but didn’t know how to, so I found that vehicle for expression through playing instruments.
KT: When did the leap to visual art occur?
The first encounter with visual art that felt meaningful to me was when I started making work on the computer. My mother was a computer programmer, so I’d been around technology from childhood, in addition to music. I fell quite deeply into making websites, coding my first website when I was nine, I think. I still recall my first image tag fondly, and that translation from code in HTML to a visual graphic on screen, to a URL that could be shared and experienced on the other side of the world. It was so exciting at the time—looking back, it really changed everything.
KT: You’ll never forget your first image tag.
Yeah, you really don’t, right? You didn’t know that you could have that power to effect technology, especially back then. In the early days of the internet, you had to do everything manually in order to show your work to the world, like hand-coding HTML, setting up your own FTP servers, and uploading to Angelfire. It felt dynamic because not only could you manipulate something on screen, but you could also show it to all of your friends who were geeky enough to be online or have a computer. So, I guess you could say I started exploring visual art through on-screen graphics. Honestly, for a long time the two were synonymous. Visual art was digital art to me.
Sougwen Chung, High Tide Etude Op 2, 2012
KT: When did it become a legitimized art form for you?
I’m not sure if I think about art in terms of legitimacy or not. Probably to the contrary, what’s really powerful about art practice is its potential generosity. It necessarily evades definition, or legitimization.
As far as my work goes, a lot of what I do today is inspired by creating new forms of collaboration; thinking about machines or environments as creative catalysts. It stems from an interest in thinking about authorship and technology. Because I started so young with computers, after a while I wondered, where was my creative agency in software? As I became proficient with the tools as an expert, I felt there was something missing.
I found that I missed physical gesture when working with computers—specifically the gestural instincts I’ve developed through violin and drawing. Sometimes working with software and code can feel like one is relegated to the screen. So that feeling led me to explore working with robots through the medium of performance, to re-engage with physical spaces. Robots are typically regarded as industrial tools, but I’ve always thought of them as a kind of kinetic sculpture. Being able to invent my own human/machine collaboration processes has been really empowering.
KT: How do you define value for your work? Is it an experience?
You could say that digital art is infinitely replicable, and performance art is inherently ephemeral, compared to the material qualities of painting, for instance. But the art world and art market function on scarcity. If something is infinitely replicable or inherently ephemeral, then what is its value? Does it undermine its value as an art form?
There’s an Agnes Martin story that I’m going to paraphrase poorly: a little girl went into her studio. Martin held up a rose and asked if it was beautiful. The girl said it was. Then Martin put it behind her back and asked the child again, if the rose was still beautiful. The child still said yes—positing that the art that is being experienced is actually the aesthetic sensation that happens within the viewer.
I’ve always really liked that, that the value of the work occurs within the experiencer of the work. It’s probably what a lot of artists who started in the digital realm feel, too, and what drew me towards the ephemerality of performance, eventually. Rather than define the value as an authority, why not accept the situatedness of valuation? It’s there and then it’s not. That’s what makes it interesting.
KT: How important do you think it is to be interdisciplinary today?
On some level, we are all interdisciplinary today, don’t you think? Digital technology is so embedded in our everyday culture. Even if you are a painter, you still check your email and use your phone, or have some sort of online presence, and are influenced by other mediums and disciplines. When I think about being interdisciplinary under the umbrella of art and technology, I can see the value of being able to experience your practice in ways that you experience your regular life.
In my studio, you can still find paints, canvases… material mess. But there’s also robotics, intangible codes, and deep learning. I think that’s why I like to show my process as part of the work—it’s important to communicate that one can engage in technologies without feeling necessarily like they are losing some inherent spirit of their practice.
I’ve become more comfortable not just occupying one space, but traversing different environments. Drawing, however, is still one of the foundations of my practice and still continues to feel like safe harbor no matter how my work evolves.
KT: How does it feel working with non-sentient collaborators?
I often perform with either multiple robotic painting linked units (20, in one instance), or one to several robotic arms. Part of what interests me in my performances is the exploration of the rawness of that interaction between myself and the machines. It’s a process of negotiation, wayfinding, and tension. When you watch the edited footage of these performances, they can look rather elegant or serene. That’s really an incomplete picture.
It’s not always comfortable, working with a non-sentient unit, even if I’ve designed the system of interactions myself. It can sometimes feel like staring into the void. It’s not exactly as straightforward as verbal communication might be with a human collaborator, and you become very aware that empathetic cues in body language do not exist in the same way.
KT: How does a programmed robotic unit respond to you? How much expression is you versus the machine?
The units respond to a variety of inputs that have developed over time. It began as a gesture-based approach, using a recurrent neural network. My line is recorded in real time, either through an overhead camera or a sensor on the tip of the brush that turns my positional data into something that can be read by the system.
The system as articulated by the robotic units then outputs a set of positions based on an interpretation of my own drawing archives from the past 20 years. It’s a multi-step process that constructs a feedback loop of my own drawing style.
During this last year, I’ve been integrating my own biometrics: data of my heart rate or brain waves. I’m trying to think about ways that humans connect to mechanical and artificial systems, and vice versa, and ways that can function as a creative catalyst.
When I take the digital simulation into physical space, I find adaptation to the errors and glitches in the process uniquely stimulating. Thrilling, even. It feels more true to how life actually is, full of the encounter with unmediated moments that go wrong. Sometimes I think creativity is working with imperfections and mess, and seeing how one adapts to them.
KT: How can you be creative within a programmed set of rules?
KT: So much can go wrong in reality. For example, even something as simple as voltage could be a problem if you are traveling to different countries. And that opens up creative opportunities?
“Opportunities” is definitely a disposition. I have so many stories from my experiences. One time I debuted a work in which the wheels of several of the robotic units slipped off their paths due to the viscosity of the paint on the canvas. The digital trial simulation did not register the physics or the materiality of the medium.
KT: I love that. It feels human, too, because you’re dealing with practical concerns.
When you see these robotic units slipping in that way, it creates a different kind of artistic activation. The audience sympathizes with the robotic units in a humanizing moment of the fallibility of the machine, but also of the human who tried to work with it. Live and learn.
KT: Do you then work with humans?
Working with the robotic units has made me more interested in collaborating with humans. I’m constantly working with other collaborators now in defining what algorithmic drawing can be today. It’s become broader in scope in a way I didn’t anticipate. It’s far more than just me drawing in a performance. It’s enabled me to take on different roles in the creative process. Behind the scenes, there’s an interconnectedness of various collaborators in an interdisciplinary ecosystem, each bringing a different perspective and skillset to the table.
KT: What’s a day in the studio like for you?
I was actually on the road for years and didn’t have a studio. I found the city then to be a little bit anxiety-inducing. In true samurai style, I worked through my mobile studio setup, traveling with a bag and a robot. That was actually a formative time for me.
I just started Studio Scilicet in 2019. It’s about thinking about the traditional artist studio as a locus for an ecology of creativity within a capitalist system. I like the idea of an art studio as a new form of creative expression in and of itself, something like a social sculpture.
That’s one mode of the studio; the other is sanctuary. Sometimes it’s just me working in isolation, essentially just drawing for days on end. I really enjoy drawing and pushing what’s achievable with the machines through that feedback loop, the open-endedness of it.
Sometimes I invite visiting artists in as residents to focus on their practice when I’m traveling on projects. We live in New York where it’s hard to find a sense of sanctuary and calm, so this latter mode is essential, and it’s been a privilege to invite practitioners I respect into a space of my own making.
KT: Do you ever feel like you need gallery representation?
I feel if you’re doing something new that’s maybe a bit uncharted, galleries might not know how to work with you yet. I’ve found that being solely reliant on a gallery becomes too great of a risk—one that doesn’t make sense if you’re doing something that doesn’t sit comfortably anywhere.
And also for someone who had an itinerant practice for years, my practice has been shaped by a poly-geographic sensibility. I aspire to be as comfortable making this work in New York as I am in Berlin or Shanghai. I’m interested in that kind of autonomy—I’ve found it to be an asset when working in the space I’m in, and trying to define a territory for myself, both literally and metaphorically. As there isn’t yet a genre or industry for human-robotic-drawing performances, a certain fluidity is essential in making one’s own way in the world.
KT: As an independent artist, how do you get your projects out there?
I share the process… maybe I live a little bit in it. The projects exist in their own world online; it looks, sounds, smells, feels like something. It’s part of the exploration, which I really do enjoy sharing as a kind of meta narrative. I think that impulse comes from my background as an early internet user. If you can communicate in a way that everyone feels they’re being spoken to, maybe they will feel like they can contribute to your story and get behind what you’re doing.
KT: You have many projects. How do you decide which to take on or decline?
I’m interested in many different things, and I’m a believer in randomness. Generally, I’m trying to say yes to people and projects I feel some connection with. I recognize when people are also trying to be inventive in their own respective gambit. I find it energizing when that dedication and value system is evident… Ultimately it’s an intuition which has done right by me so far.
I’ve been thinking about how I can align with projects that support a culture that I want to see thrive. Not only am I going to say yes to those things, but I’ve been actively seeking them out. I’m trying to be more judicious in what I say yes and no to, which is still really hard as everything, to a degree, is interesting to me.
TED was unexpected and still a bit surreal, probably because it happened rather quickly after they reached out. That’s the thing about putting things on social media, right? They found my work and felt that it was creating a space for things that hadn’t been said, centered around collective authorship and collaboration.
That being said, I knew when I was preparing the talk that I didn’t want it to be focused solely on me. Accessible to everyone; sure. But with the opportunity of such a large audience in front of me, I wanted to talk about the larger idea of collective collaboration. The talk actually inspired me to launch my studio, Scilicet (which is Latin for “permitted to know”). That’s the thing about opportunity; it empowers you to assume a bigger identity.
Scilicet is an interdisciplinary lab exploring human and non-human collaboration. It stems in part from the observation that it’s been harder for people to get funding for the arts. I wanted to create a vehicle that could help support and incubate ideas that I really believe in, that are beyond what I would do in my own practice. I feel that’s something sorely needed right now.
KT: In a way, you are an entrepreneur…
There’s this idea that in order to make art or to have an art practice, you have to have a gallery, or you need to have a trust fund, or institutional support. I don’t have any of that, and I think that keeps people afraid of making the work they are meant to make. I’ve definitely felt that at various stages in my life. Nowadays, for my part, I’m just trying to share my work and interests with as many people as possible. I guess on some level that looks like entrepreneurism.
I’ve been steered by this notion of “going where you are rare,” of trying to not limit myself to one discipline, approach, or industry. It takes a bit of focus, and the practice has evolved into what I’m doing now. It is far more than I could have imagined when I started.
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.
When Sougwen Chung and her robots paint, they are closely linked through a shared bank of knowledge, and through live, in-the-moment visual and movement cues. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Sougwen Chung has designed and programmed about two dozen Dougs, at a cost of up to $8,000 per unit. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Sougwen Chung says she prefers to call her robots collaborators. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
Sougwen Chung paints in her Brooklyn studio. (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
“Picasso used the tools of his day,” Sougwen Chung says. “I’m interested in using the technologies that define our current moment, as a way of understanding how they work in our lives." (Celeste Sloman for The Washington Post)
