For Artist Sougwen Chung, A.I. Art Is Art and Technology Is Just Another Tool
It’s not every day you witness robotic arms with brushes in hand, painting in harmonious tandem alongside a human. A rolled canvas, blank just seconds ago, is slowly being covered in an abstract medley of aquas and whites that bear the mark of three entities: two machines and one Chinese-Canadian artist, Sougwen Chung.
This isn’t the year 2035 or a leaked episode of Black Mirror Season 7, but a live demonstration of Chung’s practice before an intimate audience in Scorpios Bodrum beach club in Turkey as part of the sprawling retreat’s Encounters program that is an incubator for creative experimentation across disciplines. This season’s recently closed exhibition, “Evolving Perspectives,” probed the co-existence of technology and humankind through a creative lens.
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Seated in Scorpios Bodrum’s wellness hub, the Ritual Space, we watch Chung, who identifies as non-binary, take a seat between their two robotic systems placed at opposite peripherals of the canvas. Boldly dressed in white for the occasion, the artist enters what seems like a meditative state, despite being surrounded by curious watchers. Later, Chung would tell me that this state of complete immersion is one of the many drivers behind these performances: to escape in a room full of people and invite onlookers to do the same.
The artist begins planting broad brushstrokes onto the canvas while wearing an EEG headset that monitors their brainwaves. Minutes later, they give paintbrushes to the bespoke robotic system, the Drawing Operation Unit Generation 5 (fondly called DOUG), which has been fed with Chung’s movement and spatial data that lets it paint on its own. Working in unison, they and it engage with each other without using words; instead, their conversation is recorded on canvas in shades of blue that resemble the Aegean Sea outside. When I question this monochromality, Chung answers: “It’s a bit nerdy, but the hex value of our generation, Millennials and Gen Z, in machine-readable code returns the color blue.”
A proponent of human-machine collaboration in art since 2014, Chung’s decade-long research and work has seen the transition of A.I. and robots from vaguely discussed curiosities to readily available tools whose use is hotly debated in online public discourse. On one side, artificial intelligence could revolutionize healthcare and science and manufacturing. On the other, it may already be negatively impacting the creative classes, while the technology still has severe limitations. There’s hype on one side, panic and mistrust on the other.
Chung attributes some of the sensationalism to science fiction. “We have our terminators, matrixes and blade runners, interestingly all written by men,” they said. “When artists work with technology, we are fundamentally rewriting that narrative, not using speculative tools but actual tools.” Their work feels futuristic, but it’s very much a product of its time, and there’s a present-ness and reality to what they’re doing in the performance. “Sharing this process is a way for me to sit with both the fear and hope of these systems at the same time.”
Growing up, the long-held distinction between art and science as mutually exclusive education or career paths never made sense to Chung, whose mother is a computer programmer and father an opera singer. They found equal joy in expressing themselves through pencil lines on paper or navigating the strings of a new musical instrument and when coding and interpreting different forms of computation. For Chung, the computer and the canvas have always been one and the same; it was just a matter of combining the semantics of two different languages.
In 2014, as a research fellow at Boston’s MIT Media Lab, the artist began building their own robots that served as the blueprint of the drawing unit system that would come to be known as DOUG, currently in its fifth iteration. DOUG’s neural network has been trained on twenty years of Chung’s vast repository of drawings, which were translated into digitized data and sequential gestures connected via a feedback loop.
There are many things Chung can do that DOUG can’t do, but there are also things the machine can do that the artist can’t, and they make no secret of technology’s advantage. “I can’t measure my own brain waves,” they explain. “I can’t map the movement of crowds. I can’t hold two decades of drawing data in my mind. But through this process of conversion to machine-readable data, there’s a different type of accessibility and understanding that’s really interesting to engage with.”
In an art world where the presence of the human hand is increasingly the ultimate currency and a badge of honor, Chung has met those who shudder at the thought of a machine-made painting. “I get excited when people think I’m not making ‘real art’ because it means I’m doing something different and writing my own story,” they say. In that story, robots and artificial intelligence don’t lead to human redundancy. A.I. art is real art and, moreover, it demonstrates that machines might not be so different from us after all.
During Chung’s performance, for a brief moment toward the end, one of the robots stopped painting. The artist took the glitch in stride and took the opportunity to address the fallibility of technological systems. “There is this idea that these machines are forever, but they’re actually quite fragile and need maintenance, much like humans,” they said. “Sometimes machines don’t work or do what they are told, and we have to realize and accept that it’s never perfect. So much of what I do is uncertainty in navigation. It’s not like choreography, and there’s very little control I have in that space. The whole performance is me trying to figure it out.”