Many fear the impact of artificial intelligence on art. Sougwen Chang, a nonbinary Canadian/Chinese artist, sees AI instead as an opportunity for artists. She believes that AI can help them embrace uncertainty and encourage people to think differently about technology and creativity.
Chung’s exhibitions are fueled by technology, and they’re live and kinetic. The artwork is created in real time. The audience watches as the artist draws alongside or around one or more robots. Both human and machine are drawing simultaneously. These works are at a frontier of what it is to create art in a world of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence and robots. Chung says, “I question technology as a mere tool.”
[Chung] is a drawing and then they begin to work with AI. But not as we’ve seen with this generative AI movement, where it’s about generating images on a screen,” says Sofian Aurdry, an artist at the University of Quebec, Montreal, who studies how artists interact with machines. “[Chung is] is really into the idea of performance. They’re turning their approach to drawing into a live performance where things happen.
Audiences can watch Chung work alongside or surrounded with robots, both drawing simultaneously. Chung says that the artwork is not only in the final piece, but also in the messy in-betweens. “My goal,” they explain, “isn’t to replace traditional methods but to deepen and expand them, allowing art to arise from a genuine meeting of human and machine perspectives.” Such a meeting took place in January 2025 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Chung presented Spectral, a performative art installation featuring painting by robotic arms whose motions are guided by AI that combines data from earlier works with real-time input from an electroencephalogram.
Chung says, “My alpha states drive the robot’s behaviour, translating an inner experience into tangible, spacial gestures.” He is referring to brain activity that is associated with being calm and relaxed. They say that works like Spectralshow how AI can go beyond just being an artistic tool – or threat – to become a collaborator.
Spectral was a performative installation that featured robotic arms whose motions were guided in real-time by an EEG worn on the artist.
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Robots can perform in unexpected and surprising ways, according to Chung. Live performance is an important part of my art. It creates a relationship between me, the computer, and an audience. Everyone can witness the system’s unpredictable and creative possibilities. Their mother was a computer programmer, and their father was an opera singer. Chung was a multi-instrumentalist as a child, and her family was one of the first to own a computer. “I was raised to speak both the language and code of music,” they say. The internet opened up endless possibilities: “I felt captivated by a nascent and optimistic frontier.” Chung has been embracing performance more and more. In 2015, after studying visual and interactivity art in college and graduate schools, they joined MIT Media Lab in the role of a research fellow. “I was… inspired by the idea that the robot form could be anything – a sculptural, embodied interaction,” say the researchers.
Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (DOUG 1) was the first of Chung’s collaborative robots.
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Chung found open-source plans online and assembled a robotic arm that could hold its own pencil or paintbrush. They added an overhead camera and computer vision software that could analyze the video stream of Chung drawing and then tell the arm where to make its marks to copy Chung’s work. The robot was named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1, or DOUG 1.
The goal was mimicry: As the artist drew, the arm copied. Except it didn’t work out that way. The arm, unpredictably, made small errant movements, creating sketches that were similar to Chung’s—but not identical. These “mistakes” became part of the creative process. “One of the most transformative lessons I’ve learned is to ‘poeticize error,’” Chung says. “That mindset has given me a real sense of resilience, because I’m no longer afraid of failing; I trust that the failures themselves can be generative.”
For a third iteration of DOUG, Chung assembled a small swarm of painting robots, their movements dictated by data streaming into the studio from surveillance cameras that tracked people and cars on the streets of New York City. The robots’ paths around the canvas followed the city’s flow. DOUG 4, the version behind Spectral, connects to an EEG headset that transmits electrical signal data from Chung’s brain to the robotic arms, which then generate drawings based on those signals. “The spatiality of performance and the tactility of instruments—robotics, painting, paintbrushes, sculpture—has a grounding effect for me,” Chung says.
Artistic practices like drawing, painting, performance, and sculpture have their own creative language, Chung adds. So too does technology. “I find it fascinating to [study the] material histories of all these mediums and [find] my place within it, and without it,” they say. “It feels like contributing to something that is my own and somehow much larger than myself.”
The rise of faster, better AI models has brought a flood of concern about creativity, especially given that generative technology is trained on existing art. “I think there’s a huge problem with some of the generative AI technologies, and there’s a big threat to creativity,” says Audry, who worries that people may be tempted to disengage from creating new kinds of art. “If people get their work stolen by the system and get nothing out of it, why would they go and do it in the first place?”
Chung agrees that the rights and work of artists should be celebrated and protected, not poached to fuel generative models, but firmly believes that AI can empower creative pursuits. “Training your own models and exploring how your own data work within the feedback loop of an AI system can offer a creative catalyst for art-making,” they say.
And they are not alone in thinking that the technology threatening creative art also presents extraordinary opportunities. “There’s this expansion and mixing of disciplines, and people are breaking lines and creating mixes,” says Audry, who is “thrilled” with the approaches taken by artists like Chung. “Deep learning is supporting that because it’s so powerful, and robotics, too, is supporting that. So that’s great.”
Zihao Zhang, an architect at the City College of New York who has studied the ways that humans and machines influence each other’s actions and behaviors, sees Chung’s work as offering a different story about human-machine interactions. “We’re still kind of trapped in this idea of AI versus human, and which one’s better,” he says. AI is often characterized in the media and movies as antagonistic to humanity—something that can replace our workers or, even worse, go rogue and become destructive. He believes Chung challenges such simplistic ideas: “It’s no longer about competition, but about co-production.”
Though people have valid reasons to worry, Zhang says, in that many developers and large companies are indeed racing to create technologies that may supplant human workers, works like Chung’s subvert the idea of either-or.
Chung believes that “artificial” intelligence is still human at its core. “It relies on human data, shaped by human biases, and it impacts human experiences in turn,” they say. “These technologies don’t emerge in a vacuum—there’s real human effort and material extraction behind them. For me, art remains a space to explore and affirm human agency.”
Stephen Ornes is a science writer based in Nashville.
