“[Chung] comes from drawing, after which they begin to work with AI, however not like we’ve seen on this generative AI motion the place it’s all about producing pictures on display,” says Sofian Audry, an artist and scholar on the College of Quebec in Montreal, who research the relationships that artists set up with machines of their work. “[Chung is] actually into this concept of efficiency. In order that they’re turning their drawing method right into a performative method the place issues occur stay.”
Audiences watch as Chung works alongside or surrounded by robots, human and machine drawing concurrently.
The art work, Chung says, emerges not simply within the completed piece however in all of the messy in-betweens. “My purpose,” they clarify, “isn’t to switch conventional strategies however to deepen and develop them, permitting artwork to come up from a real assembly of human and machine views.” Such a gathering befell in January 2025 on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos, Switzerland, the place Chung offered Spectral, a performative artwork set up that includes portray by robotic arms whose motions are guided by AI that mixes knowledge from earlier works with real-time enter from an electroencephalogram. “My alpha state drives the robotic’s conduct, translating an inside expertise into tangible, spatial gestures,” says Chung, referring to mind exercise related to being quiet and relaxed. Works like Spectral, they are saying, present how AI can transfer past being simply an inventive software—or menace—to change into a collaborator.
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Via AI, says Chung, robots can carry out in sudden methods. Creating artwork in actual time permits these surprises to change into a part of the method: “Dwell efficiency is an important part of my work. It creates a real-time relationship between me, the machine, and an viewers, permitting everybody to witness the system’s unpredictabilities and artistic prospects.”
Chung grew up in Canada, the kid of immigrants from Hong Kong. Their father was a educated opera singer, their mother a pc programmer. Rising up, Chung performed a number of musical devices, and the household was among the many first on the block to have a pc. “I used to be raised talking each the language of music and the language of code,” they are saying. The web provided limitless prospects: “I used to be captivated by what I noticed as a nascent, optimistic frontier.”
Their early works, largely ink drawings on paper, tended to be sprawling, summary explosions of type and line. However more and more, Chung started to embrace efficiency. Then in 2015, at 29, after learning visible and interactive artwork in school and graduate faculty, they joined the MIT Media Lab as a analysis fellow. “I used to be impressed by … the concept the robotic type may very well be something—a sculptural embodied interplay,” they are saying.
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Chung discovered open-source plans on-line and assembled a robotic arm that would maintain its personal pencil or paintbrush. They added an overhead digital camera and laptop imaginative and prescient software program that would analyze the video stream of Chung drawing after which inform the arm the place to make its marks to repeat Chung’s work. The robotic was named Drawing Operations Unit: Era 1, or DOUG 1.
The purpose was mimicry: Because the artist drew, the arm copied. Besides it didn’t work out that manner. The arm, unpredictably, made small errant actions, creating sketches that have been just like Chung’s—however not equivalent. These “errors” turned a part of the artistic course of. “One of the vital transformative classes I’ve discovered is to ‘poeticize error,’” Chung says. “That mindset has given me an actual sense of resilience, as a result of I’m not afraid of failing; I belief that the failures themselves may be generative.”
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For the subsequent iteration of the robotic, DOUG 2, which launched in 2017, Chung spent weeks coaching a recurrent neural community utilizing their earlier work because the coaching knowledge. The ensuing robotic used a mechanical arm to generate new drawings throughout stay performances. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired the DOUG 2 mannequin as a part of a sculptural exhibit of Chung’s work in 2022.
