Sougwen Chung, Drawing Operations Duet (Performance), 2017
Pier 9, Autodesk

Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Sougwen Chung: I’m a Chinese-Canadian artist and researcher – my mother was a computer programmer, and my father was an opera singer. Growing up with computers and instruments.. I’ve come to reflect on it as a profoundly personal experience of art and technology as co-equal in their capacity for engendering creative expression and intellectual development. Co-equal and related; intertwined.

It was a time that coincided with the development of the early internet, a nascent, optimistic period for incubating ideas about the transformative possibilities of emerging technology. The internet as a connective medium, a tool of communication, but also a space of learning and expansive intellectual exploration.

When I was a researcher at MIT Media Lab, I developed an interest in collaborating with machine systems through developing custom robotic forms – moving beyond screen-based interfaces to embodied feedback loops with robotic units in which biological and kinematic gestures are layered, to explore hybrid authorship through mark-making. What becomes of the human hand when the drawn line is transposed through circuits and circuitry?

These questions were and continue to be at the heart of Drawing Operations, an exploratory project spanning almost a decade. The transition from the space of speculation and simulation to the space of deployment and embodiment was transformative, catalyzing not only the development of new creative concepts but a deeper underlying understanding of the materiality of computational systems, the limitations of the dataset, and the interrogation of the images that form our socio-technical imagination.

My interest in the development of human and machine collaborative systems began in 2014, and now the ideas I’ve been working through over the past nine years have become the zeitgeist; the mainstreaming of ai systems, large language models, and generative art.

I’m interested in the role of art practice in shaping the cultural imagination about technology. I’ve seen how a wandering interdisciplinary curiosity can be a force for breaking barriers. Barriers that restrict movement between the arts, sciences, technology, design and engineering, but also what we think of as human vs machine.

It’s part of a life-long fascination with the dynamics of individuals and systems, and all the messiness that entails. It’s how I explore questions about where does AI ends and “We” begin. It’s where art and research intersect.

Sougwen Chung: Isolation Study 6 (detail)
Gestures of Becoming-With, painting on paper, 24″ x 19in”, 2020

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?

SG: If there’s an underlying focus of the work, it’s guided by a love for the process. I’m curious about how technological configurations can be implicated in rituals like art-making. I’m inspired by the philosophy of technology and the history of cybernetics, systems theory, performance art of Gutai and Fluxus, and more recently, the microbial systems research of Lynn Margulis and early Chinese cyberneticians like Qian Xuesen. Centered amongst my collected readings is an interest in the evolution of the human hand as it pertains to the drawn mark, symbiotic robotic systems, and extended reality simulations.

How can art shape the technology that shapes us? One reason I’m interested in recurrent neural networks is the feedback loop that transpires between human input and generated output. For me, the space of embodiment is a fundamental modality of research inquiry and understanding the abstractions of data and complex systems.

Moreover, combining AI and robotics with traditional forms of creativity – visual arts, in my case – allows me to think more deeply about what is human versus what is the machine. I see human-machine art as a testing ground for examining human-machine interaction at large, which has broader implications for the relationship of technology and society. Through the projects, I work through questions of authorship, agency and control, of what it means to collaborate with the things you build, and what relationships are built upon the process of co-creation.

Sougwen Chung: The Wave

RB: Your practice revolves around human-machine collaborations. Can you say something about how your interest in exploring the dynamics between humans and systems came about, and how would you define these collaborations?

SG: Each generation of robotic system is a creative catalyst for my artistic, socio-technical and philosophical understanding. Through each I’ve been to explore the nature of drawing, the potential and limitations of the robotic form and the histories and speculative futures that justify, that enable technological development.

The term collaboration, since I first deployed it to describe the work in 2014, has been used extensively to describe any work with ai systems, large language models and generative models writ large. At the time, the responsive, ongoing, layering of marks on canvas in the space of the performance, and the ease with which anthropomorphisation of the moving system and the parallel created by mechanical arm and human arm, the intertwining of the marks and the evolution of its design lead me to a notion of collaboration in which both bodies were implicated in the space of unfolding of time and image.

While a useful term, I think it can often obscure the underlying labour involved in mainstream generative systems, while simultaneously implying a mechanical agency to the system.

RB: For many years you have been working with D.O.U.G., an artificial intelligence driven robot, as your creative collaborator. Can you say more about this and, in particular, the idea of authorship and agency?

SG: Developing new approaches to embodiment, memory, and improvisation is what excites me about technology and it’s why I program my own creative systems. It’s why art and tech intersections with robotics, ai, and virtual reality matter – it’s about exploring new ways of creating and becoming-with machines.

I work with neural networks, computer vision, biosensors, and AR/VR to create relational robotics and technologies. You can think of them as co-creative systems tied to my body, movements, and biology. I like challenging the idea of technology as a tool, towards the idea of building collaborators. Expressions of this research take the form of artefacts like painting, sculpture, performances, installations and simulations.

Generation 1 (Memory 2014 – 2015) of the D.O.U.G. project explored mimicry and computer vision via colour tracking, transmitting the position of my pen to the robotic arm to develop real-time co-creation. Shared movement. The artefacts are white ink on black paper and trace the limitations of the robotic positional translation and my own adaptations to drawing with a robotic unit for the first time.

Drawing Operations, 2015. Collaborators: Sougwen Chung & D.O.U.G._1 (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1).
Drawing Operations is an ongoing collaboration between an artist and a robotic arm. The robot mimics the artist’s drawing gesture and vice versa in real time, resulting in a synchronous, interpretive performance.

Generation 2 (Mimicry 2015 – 2016) explored memory with deep learning and recurrent neural networks, training the robot on 2 generations of my drawing data to create a gestural feedback loop based on my own style. The white and blue artefacts show a hybrid human and machine drawing, in a sense I’m collaborating with 2 decades of my drawing as remembered by a machine.

Memory Drawing, 2017. Collaborators: Sougwen Chung & D.O.U.G._L.A.S. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_3 Live Autonomous System).

Memory Drawing, 2017 (Process). The robotic arm’s behaviour is generated from neural nets trained on the artist’s drawing gestures.

Generation 3 (Collectivity 2017 – 2019) explored urban movement through a multi-robotic system. In collaboration with Bell Labs researcher Larry O’gorman who introduced me to his optical flow computer vision system, which I used to extract path data from public cameras in NYC. I designed 20 painting robots and linked them to the data to create a performance of collective machined mediated movement. A way of re-imagining landscape painting as a combination of human and machine vision, human and machine painting.

Generation 4 (Mutations of Presence; Waves 2019 – 2021) explored bio-feedback and was developed in isolation during the onset of the pandemic. I focused on internal flows of meditation captured through biometric recording with an EEG headset. I translated those states to the robotic unit as a physical expression of my meditative states during lockdown.

Generation 5 (Assembly Lines, Realm of Silk)

Sougwen Chung: Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (F.R.A.N.) is a project exploring plant and machine co-naturality.
LIVE IN TOKYO, Line Cube Theatre, Tokyo, 2022

Sougwen Chung: Flora Rearing Agricultural Network (F.R.A.N.)

RB: With your project Omnia per Omnia, you ask the question “are we at the onset of a new, collaborative imagination — of radical new intersubjectivities?” What do you mean by this?

SG: In Omnia per Omnia, I paint with a multi-robotic system connected to the flow of a city. In this work I’m exploring linkages of crowds, computer vision, and the collective robotic form. I was inspired by the idea of a panoptic view of the city through the multi-dimensional view of publicly available camera feeds, each feeding positional data into one of twenty robotic painting units, a transplacement of movement, calling into question the intent of the mark itself. By wielding a multi-valent view through computer vision, one expands the personal experience of sight. Through the multi-robotic system, the collaboration of one to one in previous generations of drawing operations extends to many to many – the field of view and the embodied mark changes shape. The combination of sensors and connected forms broadens the experience of the city through transmutation, the subjective understanding of the movement of cities fractures and reassembles as a dynamic and improvisational gestural painting, the experience of urban flow through robotic extension. The subjectivity of the human experience becomes metaphorically inter-subjective in the novel configuration of data and machine.

Omnia per Omnia, 2018. Collaborators: Sougwen Chung & D.O.U.G._L.A.S. (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_3 Live Autonomous System).

RB: There are many definitions of what drawing is, but one I am particularly interested in is that of ‘drawing as the trace of a line of thought’. How does this definition resonate with your work?

SG: Drawing is, at its heart, a cognitive act – an extension of the mind. Re-imagining through mechanical extension, sublimation, and transduction has been a way to observe its form through time and space, as well as the outer edges of the mechanical system, the technical accent—the beauty and fragility of human and machine.

Sougwen Chung: Drawing Operations 2015-2020

RB: Your project Mutations of Presence explores spectrality through sequencing biofeedback to a machine. How did this work originate and what questions does it explore?

SG: Part of an ongoing investigation into human and technological configurations, Mutations of Presence was Generation 4 of the drawing operations project, which continued the exploration of flow states from the movement of cities in Generation 3 to the pulses, current, and electricity generated by the human brain in the form of EEG signals. It examines the mark from the external movement of the body to the internal proprioception of the electrical signal of the mind. Instead of a translation of the mark as positional data gleaned through the direction of a hand, the drawing, or the collective flow of a crowd, the source data focused on the internal states gleaned by the brainwaves produced by the human subject while engaged in various activities in the research phase, which culminated in the specific relationship between the alpha brain waves produced while in a state of meditation being the robotic catalyst for painting. This coupling creates an internal re-enforcement mechanism for the production of alpha brainwaves in the meditator, myself in this case, the result of the human/machine feedback loop which can be observed as a painting performance.

RB: In recent years you have engaged in performance rituals involving biofeedback, drawing and meditating (I’m thinking particularly of your project Assembly Lines). Can you say more about this?

SG: Each generation of my robotic operations builds upon a curiosity about a relation with technology. In Assembly Lines, I’m curious about creating a process to deepen my experience of meditation. Said another way, I wanted to build a relational, robotic system to influence an internal process, a reinforcing configuration. I’m drawn to inventing feedback loops – processes tangled up in the intricacies of call and response. Sometimes polyphony, sometimes counterpoint.

In Assembly Lines, I’m suggesting an alternative to the automated process of an assembly line – building configuration of human and machine linked to a state of presence, stillness, of a kind of “inactivity” in service of something beyond mere extension.

Assembly Lines, 2022. Collaborators: Sougwen Chung. Drawing Operations Unit: Gen 5. EEG, Contact Microphones, Multi-robotic system, paint

The title of the work is a play-on-words. It deconstructs the definition of an assembly line as a process of automation in industrial manufacturing and re-establishes Assembly Lines as a space of gathering, contemplation, ceremony. I was thinking of Anna Tsing’s writing when the idea for the work came about, “The concept of assemblage— an open- ended entanglement of ways of being— is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters. To learn about an assemblage, one unravels its knots.”

The concept is continually evolving – each work takes many forms. As research, as robotic system, as dataset, as performance, as visual artefact, as kinetic installation. Assembly Lines as a kinetic installation is an echo – an echo of the live opening performance through bio-signals translated through robotic units’ movements.

Untitled 1, 2021, Biofeedback Paintings
Assembly Line Series

Untitled 2, 2021, Biofeedback Paintings
Assembly Line Series

Untitled 3, 2021, Biofeedback Paintings
Assembly Line Series

Untitled 4, 2021, Biofeedback Paintings
Assembly Line Series

RB: Pushing the boundaries of the medium is a natural part of the art making process because, in some ways, the artist is exploring the medium itself. What boundaries do you wish to push with the medium that you use?

SG: I approach technological inquiry in a personal, relational, and durational way. A generational evolution of hybrid operations as interdisciplinary curiosity and artistic expression.

The truth is, the encounter of the human and the machine artifact exists in a multitude of configurations, forms, loops, and relations. In part because the suite of AI technologies has been embedded in so many parts of our lives, shaping industries across a multitude of fields—even the fields of art and design.

At its core, my interest in working with robotics came from my practice of drawing. Working with robotics and drawing brings me back to the body — the mark-made-by-hand, and what things like muscle memory and physical instinct can inform about the creative process and how they can evolve and expand.

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All images copyright and courtesy of Sougwen Chung

Art, Artificial Intelligence, Creativity, Drawing, Installation, Science