This artist collaborates with AI and robots
For artist Sougwen Chung, AI is an opportunity to embrace uncertainty.
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.
Chung’s exhibitions are driven by technology; they’re 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-accelerating artificial intelligence and robotics. “I consistently question the idea of technology as just a utilitarian instrument,” says Chung.
“[Chung] comes from drawing, and then they start to work with AI, but not like we’ve seen in this generative AI movement where it’s all about generating images on screen,” 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. “[Chung is] really into this idea of performance. So they’re turning their drawing approach into a performative approach where things happen live.”
