Reading Blog #3
- Nadia Martin
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
In her TED Talk, “Why I Draw With Robots,” Sougwen Chung discusses her experiences working alongside AI and robots to find new processes for human creativity. Her work pushes the boundaries of digital art because when we think of digital art, we might think about the use of technology as a tool for art-making, but Chung views her work with technology as a non-human collaboration rather than just an artist using digital tools.
Chung talks about how her practice has evolved through her Drawing Operations Unit Generation robot or “DOUG.” Her first version of DOUG operated as a robotic hand that would draw alongside her and attempt to follow her movements as she drew. Through this collaboration she saw how DOUG wouldn’t follow her perfectly as it was interpreting her lines, which led to an interesting interaction between her adjusting to DOUG’s mistakes and then DOUG adjusting to her.
The outcome of this experience led Chung to embrace imperfections, as the imperfections of the robot created a human-like quality that brought intrigue to the collaboration as a whole. I believe that this idea of embracing imperfections also applies to what it means to be a digital artist because working with technology won’t always go smoothly, and sometimes mistakes can create happy accidents, like what we’ve seen through glitch art.
In her talk, Chung continued to discuss other iterations of DOUG, such as DOUG 3 where Chung taught a group of small robots to “see” by giving them visual information about the city, which they would then interpret into paths as they painted alongside Chung to create an abstract “landscape” painting of the city. Without the context of how these landscapes were created, someone might look at these paintings and not interpret them as digital art, but her collaboration with these robots blurs the lines between traditional art forms and digital art, merging the two by making a traditional painting that is conceptually a form of digital art.
Seeing how Chung works with AI and robots suggests that the future of digital art will see more non-human collaborations in artwork, which will further broaden the scope of what is considered digital art. I also believe that as technology continues to become more advanced, these sorts of collaborations will generate more controversy in the art realm (like what we already see today) since the use of machines brings into question whether humanity is required of art.
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