Sougwen Chung is a renowned Canadian-raised, Chinese-born multidisciplinary artist residing in New York. She is the pioneer of her generation in exploring the connections between handmade and machine-made designs as a way of understanding the relationship between humans and computers. The artist expresses what it is like to share a creative process with a robot through movement.
She is a former researcher at MIT’s Media Lab, she was a resident at Google, Bell Labs & New Museum, exploring innovative ways to use virtual reality for storytelling and rapid prototyping in 2016.
This artist received the Japanese Media Art Excellence Award in 2016 for her project “Drawing Operations”. She received a BFA from Indiana University and a Master’s Degree in Interactive Art from Hyper Island in Sweden. In 2014, she was selected as one of the 20 most important visual artists by Print magazine, and she is an inaugural member of NEW INC, the first art museum run by technology and in collaboration with The New Museum.
Chung has created a robotic arm that draws at the same time as her, imitating her gestures. She says that the connection she feels when experiencing this process allows her to take part in the process of slowing down, paying attention and communicating entirely through gesture.
This project consists of a webcam that is coupled with computer vision that is provided to the robot, DOUG_1, or Drawing Operations Unit, following the movements of the artist and imitating her movements as she draws different lines. It uses a Google open source software library called TensorFlow, which allows for machine learning, saving gestures from previous drawings, and then the software collects data from what it has learned about the artist’s technique and perspective and transfers it to the robotic arm that creates a man-machine connection.
This project has been exhibited at institutions such as The Drawing Center in New York and the National Art Center in Tokyo.
In 2018, the artist delved further into several modes of human and machine detection, organic and synthetic, and improvisation and computing to recreate the tradition of landscape painting as a collaboration between her, a team of robots and the dynamic flow of the city of New York.
This is an example of an artistic collaboration where the human researches and designs and then the robotic arm executes it.
