“[Chung] comes from drawing, after which they begin to work with AI, but not like we’ve seen on this generative AI movement where it’s all about generating images on screen,” says Sofian Audry, an artist and scholar on the University of Quebec in Montreal, who studies the relationships that artists establish with machines of their work. “[Chung is] really into this concept of performance. So that they’re turning their drawing approach right into a performative approach where things occur live.”
Audiences watch as Chung works alongside or surrounded by robots, human and machine drawing concurrently.
The artwork, Chung says, emerges not only within the finished piece but in all of the messy in-betweens. “My goal,” they explain, “isn’t to exchange traditional methods but to deepen and expand them, allowing art to arise from a real meeting of human and machine perspectives.” Such a gathering took place in January 2025 on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where Chung presented , a performative art installation featuring painting by robotic arms whose motions are guided by AI that mixes data from earlier works with real-time input from an electroencephalogram.
“My alpha state drives the robot’s behavior, translating an internal experience into tangible, spatial gestures,” says Chung, referring to brain activity related to being quiet and relaxed. Works like , they are saying, show how AI can move beyond being just an inventive tool—or threat—to turn out to be a collaborator.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Through AI, says Chung, robots can perform in unexpected ways. Creating art in real time allows these surprises to turn out to be a part of the method: “Live performance is a vital component of my work. It creates a real-time relationship between me, the machine, and an audience, allowing everyone to witness the system’s unpredictabilities and artistic possibilities.”
Chung grew up in Canada, the kid of immigrants from Hong Kong. Their father was a trained opera singer, their mom a pc programmer. Growing up, Chung played multiple musical instruments, and the family was among the many first on the block to have a pc. “I used to be raised speaking each the language of music and the language of code,” they are saying. The web offered unlimited possibilities: “I used to be captivated by what I saw as a nascent, optimistic frontier.”
Their early works, mostly ink drawings on paper, tended to be sprawling, abstract explosions of form and line. But increasingly, Chung began to embrace performance. Then in 2015, at 29, after studying visual and interactive art in college and graduate school, they joined the MIT Media Lab as a research fellow. “I used to be inspired by … the concept the robotic form may very well be anything—a sculptural embodied interaction,” they are saying.
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
Chung found open-source plans online and assembled a robotic arm that might hold its own pencil or paintbrush. They added an overhead camera and computer vision software that might analyze the video stream of Chung drawing after which tell the arm where to make its marks to repeat Chung’s work. The robot was named Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1, or DOUG 1.
The goal was mimicry: Because 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 just like Chung’s—but not equivalent. These “mistakes” became a part of the creative process. “One of the crucial transformative lessons I’ve learned is to ‘poeticize error,’” Chung says. “That mindset has given me an actual sense of resilience, because I’m not afraid of failing; I trust that the failures themselves might be generative.”
