INNOVATIVE ARTISTRY CREATING ART WITH AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming an increasingly inevitable force in creative art.

- Alyssa Joji Silva

Some artists are embracing AI as a collaborator, using it to evolve their artistic process. As technology advances, these artists are finding new ways to incorporate AI into their work, resulting in more innovative and unique expressions.

For example, Sougwen Chung, an internationally renowned artist and former MIT Media Lab researcher, collaborates with AI-driven machines to create art. Her work delves into the boundaries of human-machine collaboration. During her TED Talk, Chung shared how her robots seamlessly integrate with her artistic process.

Chung’s project series, Drawing Operations, features her collaboration with a robotic invention named “Drawing Operation Unit Generation” (D.O.U.G_1-2-3). This machine is designed to mimic her gestures in realtime. However, as a new creation, its results initially diverged from Chung’s movements. This discrepancy, however, led to an unexpected artistic discovery. D.O.U.G. further develops and operates using a visual algorithm trained on scanned images of her previous works. This technique, called “optical flow,” allows the robot to learn and process movement by tracking how objects move across a series of images. Chung understands that for D.O.U.G to function effectively, it needs to observe and learn to blend with her movements.