Sougwen Chung: the poetics of human–machine interaction

Sougwen Chung is a New York–London based artist, researcher, and founder of Scilicet, a studio exploring the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent systems. Their practice centers on human–machine interaction across drawing, performance, and robotics. Chung considers artificial intelligence not as a tool but as a collaborator—an evolving partner in gesture, memory, and meditation. Their ongoing project, Drawing Operations Unit: Generation (2015–), translates biosignals and neural data into shared acts of mark-making between human and machine, questioning authorship and presence in the digital age. Chung’s work has brought them international acclaim, having been exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Haus der Kunst, Art Basel, and The Drawing Center, and collected by major institutions including the V&A—the first to acquire an AI-model. A former research fellow at MIT Media Lab and Bell Labs, Chung was recently honoured with the TIME100 Impact Award and named among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI.

h: How did your practice start? What made you develop that first Drawing Operations system ten years ago? 

Sougwen Chung: I consider myself a life-long practitioner—beginning with instruments and computers at a young age. The practice has turned into a devotion to drawing in all its forms—as performance, as movement data, and as an ecological, relational medium. These ideas were first rooted in the pursuit of the beauty of a non-human gesture, in my project Drawing Operations, when I was a research fellow at the Media Lab at MIT in Boston. We recently celebrated our 10-year retrospective in Germany: our artistic research of embodied collaboration.

h: How would you describe your creative relationship with D.O.U.G.?

SC: D.O.U.G. is an acronym for Drawing Operations Unit: Generations—indirectly borrowing from the acronymic nomenclature of projects like AARON by Harold Cohen. I think of my creative relationship with D.O.U.G. as an embodied collaboration—a co-aesthetic system in which human, machine, and environment are charged with generating open choreographies of sensing and meaning. For me, the collaborative premise is one of making with, becoming with, in a state of relation rather than reduction. Perhaps more simply put, collaboration is a relationship rooted in change and the awareness that our relationships with technology, our environments, and our sense of our own bodies are there to be shaped, and that we have agency over them. My work serves as a durational laboratory for investigating these relational modes through research on emerging technologies and bioscience, as well as critical theory and the philosophy of technology, and knowledge practices like qi gong and Vedic meditation.

h: Unlike many artists who work exclusively in digital spaces, you physically paint alongside the robotic systems you build. What do you think is gained by maintaining this tactile, embodied connection to the creative process?

SC: To borrow and remix Wittgenstein, “the limits of my line are the limits of my world.” Tactility is not merely maintenance; it’s a recurrence of embodiment. It propels the computational back into the physical. It rewrites the rules. In her work The Rupture Tense, poet Jenny Xie writes about retrieval and memory—recalling and being haunted by the Cultural Revolution through the discovery of photographic negatives that document the realities of that time, hidden in the architecture of a house. To outpace the frame of truth and knowability through the practice of poetry, she reconstructs the view of history and grounds an alternative political imagination.

As a researcher and artist, I’ve been interested in outpacing the frame. What is gained by embodied connections, these explorations of gestural movements—is the agency nestled within the drawn line on paper, or the body moving through space? The autonomy and freedom of expression in gesture, extending beyond the digital into a wider array of material truths. In my work, tactility grounds the digital current. It returns to the notion that our bodies, our sensory apparatus, are fragile and form the basis for all our experiences. There’s still much about it that we don’t understand—our external expression and how it’s linked to our own internal states… how embodiment can create new pathways for cognition and expression.

I’m curious about how, in this work, I can reframe embodiment through meditation, machine gestures, and organic computation. In my project SPECTRAL, a part of the D.O.U.G._5 Series, I explore how these internal states can produce alternative approaches to drawing. My research revealed a connection between deep meditation, creative flow, and the elevation of alpha brainwaves. Art practice, for me, has always been about engaging in a grounding ritual amidst the peaks and valleys of human experience. I have been practising various forms of meditation throughout the past few years, which I heavily relied on during the lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. In D.O.U.G._5, I aimed to create a reinforcing mechanism for deepening my meditation, exploring the extension of the mark without perceptible bodily movement.

h: You’ve described your pursuit of “surprise and wonder” in how machines interpret and extend your artistic gestures. Can you recall a specific moment when a machine surprised you in an unexpected way?

SC: Because these machinic systems are linked to aspects of my biosignal, their movement becomes an extension that not only offers a surprising creative catalyst to my mark but also an alternative form of engaging with my own body.

h: Over time, you’ve moved from training robots to mimic your past work to integrating real-time data, including your brainwaves, into your process. How has this shift changed the way you think about authorship and artistic agency?

SC: The question of authorship and artistic agency is ultra-contemporary, yet rooted in the history of philosophy. In conversation with curator Shumon Basar, we discussed “Aura in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”—the much-referenced concept by Walter Benjamin, which explores the notion of artistic aura and the impact of machine production. This notion has been part of the conversation for decades in some form. Through my artistic research, I continue to explore this aspect of seeking by developing systems that utilise various sensors—not previously available to artists—to further investigate this philosophical inquiry. I’m drawn to the de- and re-materialisation of aura through meditation and biomateriality. The investigation of aura, authorship, and artistic agency serves to foreground creative freedom and artistic intent. For me, aura becomes part of a spiritual necessity inherent in manifesting one’s interior worlds. These ideas have grounded Drawing Operations throughout its generational evolution over the past decade. I wish I could say these generations felt like shifts, but really, they felt like ruptures: drawing as movement (echoed, mimicry); drawing as probability (recurrent response, memory); drawing as urban flow (swathes of crowds, collectivity); drawing as invisible and dematerialised (electric readings rematerialised as movement, spectrality); drawing as meditative ritual (gathering, assembly)—and now, drawing as sculpting in air, as architectural gesture, in multiple dimensions (spatiality).

These approaches form the connective tissue for my own authorship to extend outwards—not into an artistic artefact but into a process of growing with a machinic collaborator, one that distorts and adapts, like the sound waves of an echo bouncing off multiple surfaces: the surfaces of data, performance, narrative, and cultural meaning. Over time, I’ve come to think of this process as containing many paradoxes. At times, it feels like a porous relationship with authorship, one in which the co-aesthetic system is the structure being conceptualised over time. At times, it feels steadfastly grounded in my own individual authorship, as I emit the responses and adaptations through my own research, technical development, and philosophical inquiry. Ultimately, it’s about navigating the many paradoxes of authorship and artistic agency today and in the future. This work has been a way for me to create a place for a practice within what feels like rapidly shifting tectonic plates.

h: Your performances incorporate elements of ritual, meditation, and movement. How do these practices influence not only the artwork itself but also the way audiences engage with it?

SC: What is vital about performances is that there is so much at stake in the moment. In one of my favourite books on performance theory, Archeologies of Presence, Gabriella Giannachi writes, ‘Not only does the notion of presence in performance imply an absence, but that absence itself is the possibility of future movement; so paradoxically, presence is based not only in the present, but in our expectation of the future.’ The fragility of bodies, the anxiety of witnessing, and the sense of implicit protest that gathering together brings. Performance necessitates the vitality of the performer and the generosity, sometimes tolerance, of an audience. I have long been fascinated with repetition, stillness, and even boredom in performance work—the building of gesture. In the performances, I am thoroughly entranced in grounding myself in relational, embodied responses to the machinic system, the ritual of it, in which my awareness of the audience dissolves. I have always considered the audience to be a part of the performance, in the sense that the collective witnessing of the work over a durational frame also becomes a witnessing of one another. To what extent do we want to witness an artistic process? Or are we simply interested in the artefact? To what extent do we care about artistic labour on view? What is the engagement between human and machine? How do these systems actually work? What is being measured and concealed, and what is being revealed? These are the questions that arise from the performance work, the inquiry from the audience, which provides a microcosm for the questions we should be asking ourselves of all machinic systems.

h: As someone who works across multiple disciplines—fine art, robotics, music, and AI—how do you navigate the boundaries between them? Do you think traditional artistic categories are becoming obsolete in the digital age?

SC: To consider this question, I reflect on the role of cultural categories and my own experience as part of the Chinese diaspora, as I believe my transversality across multiple disciplines speaks to a way of being and exploring the world connected to my background. Existing categories can provide a sense of community and belonging, as well as a sense of lineage. Yet adherence to categories has contributed to a prevailing notion that practitioners working at the intersection of art and technology, or in the traditional and digital realms, are at odds. Through practice, I’ve learned that the division is an increasingly false dichotomy. For me, there is a sense of building a third culture, one that belongs to a space that is porous in its views on practice, intellectual authorship, and inclusion. Part of that porosity is the possibility of drawing from a range of influences and lineages to create alternative narratives that diverge from what came before—the opportunity to exist in one’s own plurality and make our own categories, draw our own lineages.

h: Your solo exhibition Ecologies of Becoming opened last week in Germany. It’s a retrospective of the past ten years of your work, but you’re also sharing a peek into the future. Could you tell us a little more about this?

SC: Ecologies of Becoming surveys the past decade of my research practice with Drawing Operations and introduces my current research in organic computation, gestural meditation, and silk circuitry, presented in the form of new sculptural works, installations, and a short film. It extends my body of work in embodied collaboration through ideas of diasporic nature and metamorphic systems, in which I frame the silkworm as collaborator, muse, and protagonist. The silkworm’s metamorphosis is a death that takes place not at the end of life, but in the middle of it—a dissolution as a prelude to becoming. Paradoxically, it’s both an ending and a new beginning.