It’s not every day you see robotic arms with brushes in hand, painting in sync next to a human. The folded canvas, empty a few moments ago, is slowly covered in an abstract medley of aquas and whites with the logo of three entities: two machines and one Chinese-Canadian artist, Sougwen Chung.
This is not the year 2035 or a leaked episode Black Mirror Season 7, but a live demonstration of Chung’s performance in front of an intimate audience at the Scorpios Bodrum beach club in Turkey as part of the Retreat’s emerging Encounters program which is an incubator for creative experimentation in all fields. The show that just closed this season, “Evolving Ideas,” investigated the coexistence of technology and people through a creative lens.
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Sitting in Scorpios Bodrum’s wellness space, Ritual Space, we watch Chung, who identifies as non-binary, sit between two of their robotic systems placed on opposite sides of the canvas. Dressed boldly in white for the event, the artist enters a space that seems to be meditating, despite being surrounded by curious onlookers. Later, Chung would tell me that this sense of total immersion is one of the many driving forces behind these performances: escaping a room full of people and inviting the onlookers to do the same.
The artist begins planting broad brushstrokes on the canvas while wearing an EEG headset that monitors brain waves. Minutes later, they handed paintbrushes to a bespoke robotic system, the Drawing Operation Unit Generation 5 (called DOUG), fed Chung’s movement and location data allowing it to paint itself. Working together, they and it work together without using words; instead, their conversation is filmed on canvas in shades of blue that resemble the Aegean Sea outside. When I ask this about monochromality, Chung answers: “It’s a bit of a paradox, 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 the arts since 2014, Chung’s decade of research and work has seen the transformation of AI and robotics from vaguely discussed objects to readily available tools whose use is heavily debated in public discourse online. On the other hand, artificial intelligence can transform healthcare and science and manufacturing. On the other hand, it may already be having a negative impact on the creative classes, while technology still has severe limitations. There is hype on one side, panic and mistrust on the other.
Chung says some of the thrills have to do with science fiction. “We have our shortcuts, matrixes and blade runners, the good thing is that they are all written by men,” they said. “When artists work with technology, we’re rewriting that narrative, using not speculative tools but real tools.” Their work sounds futuristic, but it is a product of its time, and there is a presence and truth to what they do in practice. “Sharing this process is a way for me to live with the fear and hope of these programs at the same time.”
Growing up, the long-held distinction between art and science as one education or career path didn’t make sense to Chung, whose mother is a computer programmer and whose father is an opera singer. They find equal joy in expressing their feelings with pencil lines on paper or fiddling with the strings of a new musical instrument as in coding and interpreting various forms of computation. For Chung, the computer and the canvas have always been synonymous; it was just a matter of combining the semantics of two different languages.
In 2014, as a researcher at Boston’s MIT Media Lab, the artist began to build his own robots that served as the blueprint for a drawing unit system that would be known as DOUG, currently in its fifth iteration. DOUG’s neural network was trained on twenty years of Chung’s vast archive of drawings, translated into digitized data and sequential gestures linked using a feedback loop.
There are many things that Chung can do that DOUG can’t do, but there are also things that a machine can do that a musician can’t, and they don’t hide that technology is useful. “I can’t measure my brain waves,” they explain. “I can’t map the movement of crowds. I can’t hold two decades of data mapping in my mind. But with this process of converting to machine-readable data, there is a different kind of accessibility and understanding that is very interesting to deal with.”
In an art world where the presence of the human hand is increasingly a currency and a badge of honor, Chung has encountered those who shudder at the thought of machine-made painting. “I’m happy when people think I’m not doing ‘real art’ because it means I’m doing something different and writing my own story,” they said. For that matter, robots and artificial intelligence are not leading to joblessness. The art of AI is real art and, more than that, it shows that machines may not be so different from us.
During Chung’s performance, for a brief moment toward the end, one of the robots stopped painting. The artist took this problem lightly and took the opportunity to fix the error of the technical systems. “There is a perception that these machines are eternal, but in reality they are fragile and need to be repaired, just like people,” they said. “Sometimes machines don’t work or do what they are told, we have to recognize and accept that they are not perfect. A lot of what I do is uncertainty in navigation. It’s not like choreography, and I have very little control in that area. All my work I try to find. “
