To an extent greater than most of us are even aware of, the convenience of our everyday lives is underpinned by a technology that has been in development for decades: artificial intelligence (AI). Now, suddenly, that subject is on everyone's lips, including its present and potential future darker sides, especially since Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed a chatbot he was working on had become sentient-shortly before Sydney, Bing's chatbot, told New York Times reporter Kevin Roose that it wanted to become human, and counseled him to leave his wife for the chatbot itself.
Chinese Canadian artist, researcher, and coder Sougwen Chung is no stranger to the meeting of art and tech: Her father was an opera singer; her mother a computer programmer. As a child, she studied violin and began to code websites while still in grade school.
During a research fellowship at MIT, she discovered robotics. "I was interested in the physical embodiment, and what it would feel like to evolve my own drawing practice," she told the Washington Post, "and I hadn't seen robots used collaboratively at that time. I wanted to try something less about robots executing an existing code and more about working together."
What resulted was several generations of robots she calls Doug, which stands for Drawing Operations Unit Generation (appended with consecutive numbers beginning with 1). She has built and programmed these robots, which are driven by AI, employing recurrent neural networks to learn how to draw in the artist's own style. With their sleek forms, they can be considered artworks in their own right.
"What would it be like," she told the Post she wanted to know, "to have a drawing collaborator that was a nonhuman machine entity?" Whether live, or, during coronavirus lockdowns, streaming on video, she has performed live with these robots, and she calls her work "embodied AI."
Among other accomplishments, she has had her work acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and has exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Basel in Miami Beach, and the New Museum in New York.
