Sougwen Chung built a drawing partner from two decades of her own marks

Sougwen Chung said MEMORY took about 25 minutes of focused drawing. Held inside that brief performance was a much longer history: two decades of creative practice, returned through a robotic drawing partner.[3]

The route to that encounter began with MIMICRY in 2015. An overhead camera watched Chung’s hand, and computer-vision software translated its movement into instructions for a robot arm. The two drew together in real time. Chung’s documentation describes an improvised exchange in which each could respond to the other’s gestures. This gave the drawing a second moving participant and made the relationship between movements part of the work. The original project credits Yotam Mann as a collaborator.[2]

MEMORY, made in 2017, changed what the machine could draw upon. The second generation of the Drawing Operations Unit, or D.O.U.G._2, used a neural network trained on Chung’s archived drawings. Patterns from those earlier marks informed the robot’s contribution while Chung drew alongside it. A personal archive had acquired a physical way to answer back, placing its interpretation within the same act of making a new drawing.[1]

In a 2022 interview with the V&A’s Katherine Mitchell, Chung described recognising ways of making marks from five or six years earlier. She understood the encounter as communication with her past drawing selves, mediated by the robot.[3]

The timing mattered as much as the resemblance. Chung told Mitchell that turning drawings into image data removed the pauses and contemplation of making them. Live performance brought back silence, rhythm and the uncertainty of what would happen next.[3]

That explains why the physical duet carries meaning beyond a recognisable style. In MIMICRY, the drawing emerged from an exchange unfolding as the participants moved. The robot’s response gave Chung something to respond to in turn. A finished image records the accumulated marks; the performance makes their relationship available as an event, with its own pace and duration.[2]

The archive also changed. Chung said she continually added new drawings and that, from 2017, those inputs already included work made with the robot. The material used to shape the collaborator was increasingly material produced through collaboration.[3]

The making was collaborative at the technical level, too. MEMORY’s project page credits Chung with technical direction and Mary Franck and Francis Tseng with prototypes. The system belongs to a documented creative practice, with named people building the conditions for the duet.[1]

The V&A’s 2022 acquisition preserved a print, a process film and a 3D-printed casing containing a USB drive with the image dataset and model details. Those components keep the result, the performance and its computational materials connected.[3]

An archive usually offers earlier work for inspection. MEMORY offers it for interaction. Chung can meet a learned trace of a previous drawing habit through another moving instrument, while continuing to make marks herself. That turns looking back into a form of working together.[1]

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