Sougwen Chung's work investigates the interactions between mark-made-by-hand and the mark- made-by-machine as an approach to understanding the dynamics of humans and systems.
A former research fellow at MIT, Chung is a pioneer of human and machine collaboration. There, she programmed and built robots named D.O.U.G. (Drawing Operations Unit Generation_X).
These machines mimic the artist’s hand-drawn gestures and synchronously draw along with her. The custom robots make marks in a feedback loop with the artist, generating sketches based on neural nets trained on Sougwen’s drawings gestures and biometrics.
Chung's work treats AI as a space of, and for, doubt and uncertainty rather than narrowly defined ends, creating works that address separation, merging, and how we inhabit the relations between human, machine and non-human others.
STUDY 31 is a collaborative painting created by Sougwen Chung and a robotic system linked to the artist’s biosignals and drawing gestures. During the creation process, Chung wears an EEG headset that measures real-time brainwave output during extended meditation. The brainwave data is translated into the brushstrokes of the D.O.U.G._4 system, a robotic drawing model trained on Chung’s evolving drawing archives. Through these studies, Chung investigates the dynamic relationship between human and machine in art-making, exploring the evolving role of the human hand in creative expression.
