It’s not daily you witness robotic arms with brushes in hand, portray in harmonious tandem alongside a human. A rolled canvas, clean simply seconds in the past, is slowly being coated in an summary medley of aquas and whites that bear the mark of three entities: two machines and one Chinese language-Canadian artist, Sougwen Chung.
This isn’t the yr 2035 or a leaked episode of Black Mirror Season 7, however a dwell demonstration of Chung’s apply earlier than an intimate viewers in Scorpios Bodrum seaside membership in Turkey as a part of the sprawling retreat’s Encounters program that’s an incubator for artistic experimentation throughout disciplines. This season’s just lately closed exhibition, “Evolving Views,” probed the co-existence of expertise and humankind via a artistic lens.
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Seated in Scorpios Bodrum’s wellness hub, the Ritual Area, we watch Chung, who identifies as non-binary, sit down between their two robotic techniques positioned at reverse peripherals of the canvas. Boldly wearing white for the event, the artist enters what looks as if a meditative state, regardless of being surrounded by curious watchers. Later, Chung would inform me that this state of full immersion is likely one of the many drivers behind these performances: to flee in a room full of individuals and invite onlookers to do the identical.
The artist begins planting broad brushstrokes onto the canvas whereas sporting an EEG headset that displays their brainwaves. Minutes later, they offer paintbrushes to the bespoke robotic system, the Drawing Operation Unit Technology 5 (fondly known as DOUG), which has been fed with Chung’s motion and spatial knowledge that lets it paint by itself. Working in unison, they and it interact with one another with out utilizing phrases; as a substitute, their dialog is recorded on canvas in shades of blue that resemble the Aegean Sea outdoors. After I query this monochromality, Chung solutions: “It’s a bit nerdy, however the hex worth of our era, Millennials and Gen Z, in machine-readable code returns the colour blue.”
A proponent of human-machine collaboration in artwork since 2014, Chung’s decade-long analysis and work has seen the transition of A.I. and robots from vaguely mentioned curiosities to available instruments whose use is hotly debated in on-line public discourse. On one aspect, synthetic intelligence may revolutionize healthcare and science and manufacturing. On the opposite, it might already be negatively impacting the artistic lessons, whereas the expertise nonetheless has extreme limitations. There’s hype on one aspect, panic and distrust on the opposite.
Chung attributes a number of the sensationalism to science fiction. “We’ve got our terminators, matrixes and blade runners, apparently all written by males,” they stated. “When artists work with expertise, we’re essentially rewriting that narrative, not utilizing speculative instruments however precise instruments.” Their work feels futuristic, however it’s very a lot a product of its time, and there’s a present-ness and actuality to what they’re doing within the efficiency. “Sharing this course of is a method for me to sit down with each the concern and hope of those techniques on the identical time.”
Rising up, the long-held distinction between artwork and science as mutually unique schooling or profession paths by no means made sense to Chung, whose mom is a pc programmer and father an opera singer. They discovered equal pleasure in expressing themselves via pencil strains on paper or navigating the strings of a brand new musical instrument and when coding and deciphering totally different types of computation. For Chung, the pc and the canvas have at all times been one and the identical; it was only a matter of mixing the semantics of two totally different languages.
In 2014, as a analysis fellow at Boston’s MIT Media Lab, the artist started constructing their very own robots that served because the blueprint of the drawing unit system that will come to be referred to as DOUG, at the moment in its fifth iteration. DOUG’s neural community has been skilled on twenty years of Chung’s huge repository of drawings, which have been translated into digitized knowledge and sequential gestures linked by way of a suggestions loop.
There are lots of issues Chung can do this DOUG can’t do, however there are additionally issues the machine can do this the artist can’t, and so they make no secret of expertise’s benefit. “I can’t measure my very own mind waves,” they clarify. “I can’t map the motion of crowds. I can’t maintain twenty years of drawing knowledge in my thoughts. However via this technique of conversion to machine-readable knowledge, there’s a special kind of accessibility and understanding that’s actually fascinating to have interaction with.”
In an artwork world the place the presence of the human hand is more and more the last word forex and a badge of honor, Chung has met those that shudder on the considered a machine-made portray. “I get excited when individuals assume I’m not making ‘actual artwork’ as a result of it means I’m doing one thing totally different and writing my very own story,” they are saying. In that story, robots and synthetic intelligence don’t result in human redundancy. A.I. artwork is actual artwork and, furthermore, it demonstrates that machines may not be so totally different from us in any case.
Throughout Chung’s efficiency, for a short second towards the tip, one of many robots stopped portray. The artist took the glitch in stride and took the chance to handle the fallibility of technological techniques. “There’s this concept that these machines are ceaselessly, however they’re truly fairly fragile and wish upkeep, very like people,” they stated. “Typically machines don’t work or do what they’re instructed, and we’ve got to understand and settle for that it’s by no means excellent. A lot of what I do is uncertainty in navigation. It’s not like choreography, and there’s little or no management I’ve in that area. The entire efficiency is me attempting to determine it out.”
