Most AI-based artists work exclusively in front of their computers. Sougwen Chung is different: they train robots to physically paint in tandem with them on massive canvases. Before they used AI, Chung, who identifies as nonbinary, painted expansive abstract artworks filled with bold, flowing lines. They then trained a neural net on decades of those paintings—and built robots trained on those neural nets to paint with them in real time. When they paint a line, the robots mimic Chung’s line and then extend it outward with new ideas and patterns. “What I’m chasing is that surprise and wonder in that machine translation,” Chung says.
Chung, 38, travels the world, painting with their robots for live audiences. Chung compares their relationship with their robots to that of a musician with their violin. “In some ways, the robotic system is a kinetic instrument that I’m navigating with,” they say.
Multidisciplinary artist Sougwen Chung delves into her unique contributions to the exhibition GEN/GEN: Generative Generations, the evolving discourse on human-machine interconnections and more with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony).
“My work, at its simplest level, is about exploring the contradictions that stem from not fitting neatly into one category,” Sougwen Chung, who identifies as nonbinary, said on Sunday in Dubai, where they accepted a TIME100 Impact Award for their influence on the field of artificial intelligence. “I like to think of [it] as a new hybridity.” Read more: https://time.com/collection/time100-i...
💙 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.
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."
Thank you to Art In America magazine and Jason Bailey for featuring my drawing on their January issue, focusing on Generative Art. This represents a milestone in the industry of Art and Technology, and its an truly an honour to be featured here.
I made this drawing in 2017, during a residency in Tokyo. The project was an experiment; entirely self directed, simply to explore a curiosity. At the time, I was just getting started working with robots after many years of making digital and installation art through code and drawing.
The process of moving beyond what was on-screen was liberating; bringing code into a medium like robotics was a way I could return the physicality of art making back into the work.
It felt like a coming home — my years of drawing, which always felt obscured by software tools, felt like it could be playful, adaptive, and imperfect, in a way that could help me grow as an artist.
I’ve learned a lot about technology through making art with machines — which began over 5 years ago. I learned that the human hand is always present, and “the AI” is always a system that reflects some known and unknown aspects of its designer.
There’s a lot of hype surrounding this idea of “AI Art” at the moment. I think it’s largely driven by a subconscious anxiety of how intertwined in our lives digital technology has become. People appear to really like thinking that the AI is making music, making poetry, making painting. Perhaps this is because if “the AI” can make beautiful art, it might somehow make up for the fact that “the AI” is also taking our jobs, making biased policy decisions, and shaping our society in ways we don’t really understand. The ‘AI as artist’ is an alluring idea that helps soothe, perhaps, a fear of these technologies, but it’s one that does nothing to empower us in the face of technological change.
As an alternative to this, I like to think of the potential for AI systems as collaborators. Why? Because we’ve all had collaborators, good and bad. Collaboration is about making with; it can be about control and dominance, but it can also be generosity and kindness. Ultimately, these AI systems can be created in the service of working together, to make something better for both human and machine.
For me, that’s what is promising and hopeful about working with these technologies - in fact, I think it might be an imperative. We should be designing these technologies to make us, and the world, better. To achieve this goal, art and technology are a very natural pairing; they both reflect the culture in which they are made, and both have the power to profoundly shape the future we want to see.
Deeply grateful to @Lumen_prize, for awarding the Art and Technology Prize to Drawing Operations, a project I started in 2015 exploring human and machine collaboration. Thank you Carla Rapoport, and Jack Addis for your support and welcoming me into the Lumens family. . . In these deeply uncertain times, I find myself thinking of #DonnaHaraway’s writing in Staying With The Trouble 🖤: “It matters what worlds world worlds. We become together or not at all." Collaboration, for me, is a way to steer away from "a technophobic spiral, by conceiving of humans & machines as interacting parts of complex adaptive systems." . . .
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.
