Artist: Sougwen Chung Artwork: Drawing Operations Year: 2015–ongoing
Overview
Sougwen Chung is a Chinese-Canadian artist and former researcher-in-residence at MIT Media Lab and Bell Labs. Her long-running project Drawing Operations explores human–machine collaboration by treating AI not as a tool, but as a co-creative agent. Using motion capture and machine learning, Chung trains an AI model on her own drawing gestures. She then draws in real time alongside a robotic arm, which interprets and responds to her movements. The resulting works contain traces of both—intertwined yet distinct.
Critical Reflection
The most radical proposition of this work is its redefinition of AI as a co-present collaborator rather than a predictable system or spectacle. Chung does not foreground the AI’s capacity for technical precision or visual novelty. Instead, she embraces its limitations and unpredictability, allowing the machine to “fail,” to imitate imperfectly, and to learn through relation.
This model of interaction resonates strongly with the notion of ontological care. Rather than reducing interactivity to a set of pre-scripted outputs, Chung builds an interface of trust, transparency, and shared agency. The machine is not a proxy for her hand, but a differentiated presence—one that invites audiences to reconsider authorship, autonomy, and collaboration in computational art.
Sougwen Chung
