{"id":827824,"date":"2025-02-18T01:11:45","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/18\/this-artist-collaborates-with-ai-and-robots\/"},"modified":"2025-02-18T01:11:45","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T07:11:45","slug":"this-artist-collaborates-with-ai-and-robots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2025\/02\/18\/this-artist-collaborates-with-ai-and-robots\/","title":{"rendered":"This artist collaborates with AI and robots"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Many artists worry about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on artistic creation. But Sougwen Chung, a nonbinary Canadian-Chinese artist, instead sees AI as an opportunity for artists to embrace uncertainty and challenge people to think about technology and creativity in unexpected ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Chung\u2019s exhibitions are driven by technology; they\u2019re also live and kinetic, with the artwork emerging in real time. Audiences watch as the artist works alongside or surrounded by one or more robots, human and machine drawing simultaneously. These works are at the frontier of what it means to make art in an age of fast-\u00adaccelerating artificial intelligence and robotics. \u201cI consistently question the idea of technology as just a utilitarian instrument,\u201d says Chung.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201c[Chung] comes from drawing, and then they start to work with AI, but not like we\u2019ve seen in this generative AI movement where it\u2019s all about generating images on screen,\u201d says Sofian Audry, an artist and scholar at the University of Quebec in Montreal, who studies the relationships that artists establish with machines in their work. \u201c[Chung is] really into this idea of performance. So they\u2019re turning their drawing approach into a performative approach where things happen live.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Audiences watch as Chung works alongside or surrounded by robots, human and machine drawing simultaneously.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The artwork, Chung says, emerges not just in the finished piece but in all the messy in-betweens. \u201cMy goal,\u201d they explain, \u201cisn\u2019t to replace traditional methods but to deepen and expand them, allowing art to arise from a genuine meeting of human and machine perspectives.\u201d Such a meeting took place in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Chung presented Spectral<\/em>, a performative art installation featuring painting by robotic arms whose motions are guided by AI that combines data from earlier works with real-time input from an electroencephalogram. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy alpha state drives the robot\u2019s behavior, translating an internal experience into tangible, spatial gestures,\u201d says Chung, referring to brain activity associated with being quiet and relaxed. Works like Spectral<\/em>, they say, show how AI can move beyond being just an artistic tool\u2014or threat\u2014to become a collaborator.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Spectral, a performative art installation presented in January, featured robotic arms whose drawing motions were guided by real-time input from an EEG worn by the artist.<\/figcaption>

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Through AI, says Chung, robots can perform in unexpected ways. Creating art in real time allows these surprises to become part of the process: \u201cLive performance is a crucial component of my work. It creates a real-time relationship between me, the machine, and an audience, allowing everyone to witness the system\u2019s unpredictabilities and creative possibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chung grew up in Canada, the child of immigrants from Hong Kong. Their father was a trained opera singer, their mom a computer programmer. Growing up, Chung played multiple musical instruments, and the family was among the first on the block to have a computer. \u201cI was raised speaking both the language of music and the language of code,\u201d they say. The internet offered unlimited possibilities: \u201cI was captivated by what I saw as a nascent, optimistic frontier.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n

Their early works, mostly ink drawings on paper, tended to be sprawling, abstract explosions of form and line. But increasingly, Chung began to embrace performance. Then in 2015, at 29, after studying visual and interactive art in college and graduate school, they joined the MIT Media Lab as a research fellow. \u201cI was inspired by \u2026 the idea that the robotic form could be anything\u2014a sculptural embodied interaction,\u201d they say.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (DOUG 1) was the first of Chung\u2019s collaborative robots.<\/figcaption>

COURTESY OF THE ARTIST<\/p>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n

Chung found open-source plans online and assembled a robotic arm that could hold its own pencil or paintbrush. They added an overhead camera and computer vision software that could analyze the video stream of Chung drawing and then tell the arm where to make its marks to copy Chung\u2019s work. The robot was named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1, or DOUG 1.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The goal was mimicry: As the artist drew, the arm copied. Except it didn\u2019t work out that way. The arm, unpredictably, made small errant movements, creating sketches that were similar to Chung\u2019s\u2014but not identical. These \u201cmistakes\u201d became part of the creative process. \u201cOne of the most transformative lessons I\u2019ve learned is to \u2018poeticize error,\u2019\u201d Chung says. \u201cThat mindset has given me a real sense of resilience, because I\u2019m no longer afraid of failing; I trust that the failures themselves can be generative.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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For a third iteration of DOUG, Chung assembled a small swarm of painting robots, their movements dictated by data streaming into the studio from surveillance cameras that tracked people and cars on the streets of New York City. The robots\u2019 paths around the canvas followed the city\u2019s flow. DOUG 4, the version behind Spectral<\/em>, connects to an EEG headset that transmits electrical signal data from Chung\u2019s brain to the robotic arms, which then generate drawings based on those signals. \u201cThe spatiality of performance and the tactility of instruments\u2014robotics, painting, paintbrushes, sculpture\u2014has a grounding effect for me,\u201d Chung says.<\/p>\n

Artistic practices like drawing, painting, performance, and sculpture have their own creative language, Chung adds. So too does technology. \u201cI find it fascinating to [study the] material histories of all these mediums and [find] my place within it, and without it,\u201d they say. \u201cIt feels like contributing to something that is my own and somehow much larger than myself.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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The rise of faster, better AI models has brought a flood of concern about creativity, especially given that generative technology is trained on existing art. \u201cI think there\u2019s a huge problem with some of the generative AI technologies, and there\u2019s a big threat to creativity,\u201d says Audry, who worries that people may be tempted to disengage from creating new kinds of art. \u201cIf people get their work stolen by the system and get nothing out of it, why would they go and do it in the first place?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chung agrees that the rights and work of artists should be celebrated and protected, not poached to fuel generative models, but firmly believes that AI can empower creative pursuits. \u201cTraining your own models and exploring how your own data work within the feedback loop of an AI system can offer a creative catalyst for art-making,\u201d they say.<\/p>\n

And they are not alone in thinking that the technology threatening creative art also presents extraordinary opportunities. \u201cThere\u2019s this expansion and mixing of disciplines, and people are breaking lines and creating mixes,\u201d says Audry, who is \u201cthrilled\u201d with the approaches taken by artists like Chung. \u201cDeep learning is supporting that because it\u2019s so powerful, and robotics, too, is supporting that. So that\u2019s great.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Zihao Zhang, an architect at the City College of New York who has studied the ways that humans and machines influence each other\u2019s actions and behaviors, sees Chung\u2019s work as offering a different story about human-machine interactions. \u201cWe\u2019re still kind of trapped in this idea of AI versus human, and which one\u2019s better,\u201d he says. AI is often characterized in the media and movies as antagonistic to humanity\u2014something that can replace our workers or, even worse, go rogue and become destructive. He believes Chung challenges such simplistic ideas: \u201cIt\u2019s no longer about competition, but about co-production.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though people have valid reasons to worry, Zhang says, in that many developers and large companies are indeed racing to create technologies that may supplant human workers, works like Chung\u2019s subvert the idea of either-or.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Chung believes that \u201cartificial\u201d intelligence is still human at its core. \u201cIt relies on human data, shaped by human biases, and it impacts human experiences in turn,\u201d they say. \u201cThese technologies don\u2019t emerge in a vacuum\u2014there\u2019s real human effort and material extraction behind them. For me, art remains a space to explore and affirm human agency.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stephen Ornes is a science writer based in Nashville.<\/em> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Stephen Ornes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many artists worry about the encroachment of artificial intelligence on artistic creation. But Sougwen Chung, a nonbinary Canadian-Chinese artist, instead sees AI as an opportunity for artists to embrace uncertainty and challenge people to think about technology and creativity in unexpected ways.\u00a0 Chung\u2019s exhibitions are driven by technology; they\u2019re also live and kinetic, with the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":827825,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1896,52590,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-827824","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artist","8":"category-collaborates","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=827824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/827824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/827825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=827824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=827824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=827824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}