Sougwen Chung — drawing with robotic collaborators

2017

Artists: Sougwen Chung · Year: 2017 · Medium: Performance-drawing — Chung drawing alongside robotic systems trained on her past drawings, producing collaborative hybrid compositions · Substrate: Robotic arms and drawing systems; neural-network training on Chung's historical drawing archive; real-time performance with the robots as collaborators · Place: New York, USA / London, UK · Institution: Independent; various major commission venues Sougwen Chung's Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (D.O.U.G.1, 2015) and subsequent generations of the Drawing Operations series (D.O.U.G.2, 2017; D.O.U.G.3, 2018; continuing through the 2020s) are performance-sculptures in which Chung, a Chinese-Canadian artist, draws on large-format paper alongside a robotic arm (the "DOUG" of the title) whose behavior has been trained on Chung's own prior drawing practice. The two artists — human and machine — draw together, in real time, producing a single joint drawing across hours of performance. D.O.U.G.2 (2017) is the breakthrough generation: the robotic arm's behavior is driven by a neural network Chung had trained on thousands of her own archival drawings, so that the robot's marks are recognizably in Chung's hand without being copies of specific Chung works. The robot draws what Chung might have drawn. Chung draws what the robot has not drawn. The interaction between the two is sometimes collaborative, sometimes competitive, sometimes dialogic in ways that are hard to describe without being there. Chung's argument across the D.O.U.G. series is that the emerging conversation about "AI art" has been dominated by a specifically commercial framing (will AI replace artists? can AI make art? etc.) that misses the more interesting question: what happens when a specific artist uses specifically-trained machine systems as collaborators in specifically situated performance practice? Her answer is that the result is a form of drawing that neither the artist alone nor the machine alone could have produced, and that this is the interesting aesthetic territory. Chung has performed D.O.U.G. generations at Ars Electronica (2015 Golden Nica), the Barbican in London, MoCA Toronto, the UN Headquarters in New York, and dozens of other venues worldwide. She maintains her studio in Brooklyn and London and is one of the most-commissioned interactive-AI artists of her generation. Her 2022 book Drawing with DOUG (distributed by MIT Press) is the published account of the project. Lore Chung's collaboration with DOUG is physically demanding. Each D.O.U.G. performance runs four to six hours, during which Chung stands at a large-format drawing surface alongside the robotic arm, makes continuous marks, and tracks the arm's movement in her peripheral vision so that their two bodies of work compose as a single drawing. She has said in interviews that the performances are exhausting in ways her earlier solo-drawing practice was not — the attention to the robot is its own form of labor. The D.O.U.G. hardware itself has evolved significantly across generations; the 2017 D.O.U.G._2 used a modified commercial industrial-arm platform, while subsequent generations have been custom-built. Chung stores the physical robot between performances at her Brooklyn studio. Sources • Chung, Sougwen — Drawing with DOUG (MIT Press, 2022). • Chung, Sougwen — sougwen.com (artist archive). • Ars Electronica Archive — 2015 Golden Nica citation (D.O.U.G._1).