Collaboration

Collaboration

The visual artist Sougwen Chung has been programming robots to collaborate with her in creating visual art. In her TED Talk she says she wants to push the long tradition of “marks made by the human hand”. How this works is that Chung draws together with robot arms holding a stylus; and at other times, paints around and with robots trundling over a large canvas releasing paint. In Omnia per Omnia (2018) she used a dataset of human movement flows in New York City as captured by surveillance cameras to program her robot collaborator’ ‘Douglas’ (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_3 Live Autonomous System). In Exquisite Corpus (2019) Chung uses her own biometric data. The results are visual filigrees of human and machine responding and relating to each other. She says of her work: “I found that I missed physical gesture when working with computers—specifically the gestural instincts I’ve developed through violin and drawing. Sometimes working with software and code can feel like one is relegated to the screen. So that feeling led me to explore working with robots through the medium of performance, to re-engage with physical spaces. Robots are typically regarded as industrial tools, but I’ve always thought of them as a kind of kinetic sculpture. Being able to invent my own human/machine collaboration processes has been really empowering.”

Sougwen Chung. https://sougwen.com/info