January 3, 2021

Biometric Flora

Intertwining my meditation and art practice. They're both simple interventions that shape my days -- alternating between varying states of flow, alternatives to the addiction to control, reliance on certainty

December 28, 2020

// drawing in lockdown //

I used to draw differently.
My approach to drawing and machine learning, data, and robotics started as a way to evolve my drawing ability by designing artificial intelligence systems, to explore collaboration with a robotic unit.

Since the pandemic, my focus has been on the possibilities of robots as a medium of collective collaboration, communication and connection.

Especially true this year, the necessity of inventing processes of adapting to circumstances such as these, with drawing as current and ground.

I'll be publishing more experiments, sketches and writing in the coming year. Sougwen.com/sketches

December 21, 2020

// SECOND NATURE //

Learning shelter, communal thinking, escapist magical realism

// mycelial machinations -- wild / life //

witness & unfurl -- terrestrial microbial worlds -- ( shelter-in-place ) //

Music by @a_q_u_a_r_i_a_n

// mycelium electron microscopy //

// Exploration vs deprivation //

Cognitive bias as sensory deprivation, a form of sense-making based on reduction.

Art-making as developing what I think and feel before there are words to articulate it, a form of world-building built on sensory exploration.
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#weirdplants#artstudio#wildlife#drawing#plantsofinstagram#ecologiesofbecomingwith#mixedreality#virtualreality#augmentedreality#orchidformation

December 16, 2020

Orchid Formations

witness & unfurl -- terrestrial microbial worlds -- ( shelter-in-place ) // // petal pirouette --wild / life // / orchid formations embedded in air / . #artstudio #wildlife #drawing #ecologiesofbecomingwith #mixedreality #virtualreality #augmentedreality #orchidformation

July 1, 2020

~ ( distance ) in place ~

Corpus I from the series ( distance ) in place, 2020, graphite on paper | collaboration with D.O.U.G._5. All images courtesy of the artist.

As external realities we once knew have dissolved and fragmented over the span of months, a sudden reframing of intimacy has become inevitable. Enforced cohabiting with loved ones or strangers; check-ins over apps that mediate care; video encounters that relay oddly official views of hitherto-private spaces—all interactions now manifest with a prickling sensation of detachment in escort.

https://alanguageforintimacy.com/

Sougwen Chung’s drawings, wandering and languid, signal a search for intimacy without the privilege of physical proximity. Each was created in collaboration with a robotic arm (which Chung christened “D.O.U.G._5,” for “Drawing Operations Unit Generation 5”) and made in response to her ongoing experience of self-isolating—to give shape to what the artist describes as a “surreality around distance.” The arm, a gradually evolving machine Chung has been drawing alongside since 2014, runs on a recurrent neural network trained to recognize and generate repeated gestures and patterns found in Chung’s artwork.

However, this unit departs from previous models that interpreted non-representational, expressionist linework, and instead processes Chung’s own sketches of human figures; it is newly tasked with sensing and rearticulating these skeletal traces, which it carries out in unpredictable and fallible ways. On paper, although we see the combined renderings of two symbiotic presences—one sun-seeking, one non-sentient—meeting on the same plane, the markings of one are indistinguishable extensions of the other’s. The hybridized bodies are somewhat spectral, murky negotiations that materialize freely over time and space.

In this gesture-sharing lies a longing for touch—that simple, now precious commodity—but also a kernel of conjurable futures. Our current systems of communication, in this era of profound unrest, beg for more than disruption, but a restart. How can we decenter the individual human being and renounce habitual conditions that lead to continuous drain and existential distress, and instead generate possibilities for collective nourishment, action, and change?

Chung’s practice—having moved far beyond simplifying binaries of real and artificial, human and machine—urges the poetic promise of mechanical and artificial systems to imagine forms of closeness in an increasingly estranged world. A result of the human sensorium through and through, her works double down on the entanglement of all bodies (biological, mechanical, and otherwise), never really disembodied but always becoming.
Sougwen 愫君 Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and (re)searcher based in New York. Chung's work explores the mark-made-by-hand and the mark-made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems. Chung is a former research fellow at MIT’s Media Lab and a pioneer in the field of human-machine collaboration. In 2019, she was selected as the Woman of the Year in Monaco for achievement in the Arts & Sciences.
Claire Voon is a Singaporean freelance writer who covers contemporary art in Chicago, with a focus on historically underrepresented artists and their practices. She was formerly an assistant editor at Chicago magazine and a staff writer at Hyperallergic. Her journalism and criticism has also appeared in publications including the New York TimesARTnewsArtsyNew York Magazine, the Offing, and the Brooklyn Rail.

May 21, 2020

〰️ views from somewhere 〰️

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During quarantine, I've been gazing at the city through its public cameras, searching for absence of crowds. It’s an activity that offers some small assurance that people outside of my periphery might be staying safe at home, and the sense that I am there, somehow. .

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About three years ago I was looking for crowds, in Omnia per Omnia we traced the machinic gaze of the same public cameras as the brush strokes of 20 robotic swarm units. The physical movement of the collective, now dispersed.

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In the past, the movement of my robots were linked to the motion of a crowd, and now the multiple views of the city offering a sense of connection without proximity. These words by Haraway resonating differently — .

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To explore a "collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of (drawing / making) living within limits and contradictions — of views from somewhere.” .

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And some closing words about landscape drawing by Berger.

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📷: @mynameiscutter .

#omniaperomnia #viewsfromsomewhere #humanmachinecollaboration #DrawingwithDoug #DonnaHaraway

May 4, 2020

〰️ a vial of invisible ink 〰️

Missing this peaceful moment from my last performance. I like that the image captures the inherent stillness of the process of drawing. Despite uncertainty, the lines are grounding.
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I'm slowly working on a tele-present version of the performance while sheltering in place during the lockdown and hope to share some of the feeling of this space with you soon ~
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#DrawingwithDoug #humanmachinecollaboration #sougwenchung #iching #telepresence #performanceart #humanrobotcollaboration

April 27, 2020

〰️ Flora Rearing Agricultural Network 〰️

I've been recording my EEG data while meditating a few times a day in isolation. When I do, I see visions of microbial cells, vertiginous circuits, plants / machines co-naturality. .
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Preparation for an upcoming tele-present performance ~
Music by @aquarianyes
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#florarearingagriculturalnetwork #farmingwithfran #drawingwithfran #humanmachinecollaboration #flora #eegmeditations

March 4, 2020

〰️ Flowering Venus fly trap in winter 〰️

( Noticing attunes us to worlds otherwise )
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Conservation status: vulnerable
Reproduction: sexual and asexual
Carnivorous plant
Lifespan: 20 years .

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
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