Sougwen Chung

Sougwen Chung is a Toronto-born, London-based artist and former MIT Media Lab researcher whose practice asks what a brushstroke means when a machine makes it alongside you. Trained as a violinist and visual artist, Chung began experimenting with human-machine drawing at the Media Lab in 2015, creating the first of the robots collectively named D.O.U.G. — Drawing Operations Unit, Generations 1 through 6.

Painting in duet with machines

Each generation of D.O.U.G. explores a different mode of collaboration: mimicking Chung’s strokes in real time, replaying two decades of the artist’s drawings from memory, painting from live city data, even responding to Chung’s brainwaves — in the work Spectral, an EEG headset lets the artist’s meditative alpha state drive the robot’s gestures. The performances are deliberately imperfect; Chung describes the most transformative lesson of a decade with these systems as learning to “poeticize error.”

The work has moved from the lab to the world’s major institutions: the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired Chung’s work in 2022, exhibitions have run from the ArtScience Museum in Singapore to Kunstmuseum Basel, and in 2023 TIME named Chung to its inaugural TIME100 AI list for pioneering the combination of painting and robotics.

Chung’s stance is embrace with authorship: rather than prompting a model trained on other people’s art, the artist trains systems on their own strokes and their own archive — a model of AI collaboration even many AI skeptics cite approvingly, and a deliberate rejection of the framing of AI as either mere tool or looming threat.