Looking Outwards 2

For this week’s looking outwards assignment, I decided to explore Sougwen Chung’s “Drawing Operations”, a piece of improvised drawing collaboration between Sougwen and a robot. The robot is connected to a neural network, trained on Sougwen’s other drawings using computer vision: gestures from her previous works are saved into the neural net’s memory, and analyzed with comparison to other known styles to ‘translate’ the gestures into executable vectors with color palettes that the robot can then execute. The final product is a drawing duet with Sougwen and the robot.
Sougwen wanted to explore the concepts of “ownership” and “collaboration” through this piece. In the drawing duet, the robot and the artist co-create a piece of art, inspired by the artist’s previous work. I am very attracted to this concept, and a really interested in learning more about Sougwen’s other works and exploration of art and labor as a commodity.

Sougwen Chung, Drawing Operations (2014)