February 15, 2024

TIME100 Impact Award Winner

💙 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.

Sougwen Chung


Together we can grow our souls to create the future we want to see, and there is much to do. Thank you so much."

https://time.com/collection/time100-impact-awards/

December 8, 2023

Where AI Ends and We Begin – Guest Essay for the New York Times

Chung, Sougwen. “Where Does A.I. End and We Begin?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 7 Dec. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/special-series/artificial-intelligence-art.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EE0.eiMW.j35PQKm8GJih&smid=url-share.

Where does A.I. end and we begin?

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?

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.

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.

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.

March 28, 2023

Sougwen Chung’s Assembly Lines featured on Design Boom

Assembly Lines by Sougwen Chung was exhibited at EMMA Museum in Espoo, Finland from 27 August 2022 and 15 January 2023.

Read the article here.

January 5, 2023

V&A’s acquisition of Sougwen Chung’s work MEMORY featured in Outland

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."

Read the full article here.

January 1, 2023

‘In Search of the Present’ among 10 best art exhibitions to see in 2023 – Wallpaper*

‘In Search of the Present’ at Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland was selected as one of the 10 best art exhibitions to see in 2023, by Wallpaper* arts editor Harriet Lloyd-Smith.

"What is intelligence, where it can be found, and where it can go? asks EMMA’s group show ‘In Search of the Present’. 16 artists including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Refik Anadol, Raimo Saarinen and Sougwen Chung dissect the intersections of nature, technology and art. As well as cutting-edge AI, the show also spotlights the often underestimated power of intelligence in the natural world."

Read the article here.

Wallpaper* has also previously written about "In Search of the Present" in an article entitled: Art, technology and nature intersect at Finland’s Espoo Museum of Modern Art.

December 22, 2022

Sougwen Chung on United Nations – AI for Good

From the AI for Good Website

Increasingly, multidisciplinary artists and creative technologists are guiding the bleeding edge of innovation, and establishing crucial new narratives for wider society. In this episode, Sougwen Chung will offer an intimate insight into her work — illustrating the technicality and methodology of her practice; her exemplary projects; and theoretical ideas which color and stretch our present day understanding of social and technological synergy. WHAT IS A.I.V.I.? The Artistic Intelligence Visionary Initiative (A.I.V.I) is an AI for Good initiative curated by R100Studios, seeking out the artists who create works that aid our understating of technology and guide our future relationships with innovation and culture. The initiative helps us illuminate and celebrate the role of the artistic expert in shaping our futures and cultivating practical new attitudes to research, communication and narrative.

link to Sougwen's Profile on AI for Good

December 20, 2022

V&A Museum Collects MEMORY (D.O.U.G._2)

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 the @vamuseum and my team @studioscilicet
and co-director @tessanydam in seeing this historic acquisition through.

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.

More thoughts to come as always.
.
.
.
.
.

October 24, 2022

Sensory mixes of the future: Sougwen 愫君 Chung’s new large-scale kinetic installation features a new multi-robotic Drawing Operations Unit

Inner Magazines featured Assembly Lines, which premiered at the exhibition In Search of the Present at EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art in Finland.

Read the article here.

January 5, 2021

Winner in “Science in the Arts”

“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.

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.

Copyright Sougwen Chung
css.php