How Sougwen Chung teaches robots to pause

Sougwen Chung has spent more than a decade drawing alongside robots—not to automate their art, but to discover what changes when a machine becomes a creative partner. They join Reid to trace the evolution of D. O. U. G., a series of robotic collaborators that learns from Sougwen’s gestures, including a neural network trained on two decades of their drawings. Sougwen explains why unexpected machine marks became errors to “poeticize,” what becoming machine-readable taught them about remaining human, and why they call their practice “operational art” rather than “AI art.” They also explore a new system guided by brainwaves and an ancient calligraphic pause—and ask whether the intelligent systems we build need more than speed and capability. Maybe they also need silence, restraint, and the wisdom to wait. Credits: A big thanks to Natalie Stone, Tessa Nijdam, Arina Ermakova , the Scilicet team, Fellowship, Reece Straw, Sam Osborn, Nick Capezzera, Maximilian Andereya, Peter Butterworth, Haruka Wang and the team at Mosaic Ventures for hosting the conversation. Additional Credits: MIMICRY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_1), 2015. Footage: Sam Osborn and Nick Capezzera. MEMORY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_2), 2017. Footage: NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo. COLLECTIVITY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_3), 2018. Footage: New INC & Nokia Bell Labs. SPECTRALITY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_4), 2020. Footage: Maximilian Andereya. ASSEMBLY (Drawing Operations Unit: Generation_5), 2022. Footage: Peter Butterworth. GENESIS Process Film, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Studio SCILICET.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've been converting my brainwave signals into a genomic sequence.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  One way in which I'm not interested in being machine readable is for me, the work that I'm doing is about my own learning in a way. So I don't want to be machine executable. Why would I want to build a system that takes the way, takes away the thing I love the most from me, you know? So and I, and I can say to this day, I draw more than I ever have. For me, it's about extended authorship. It's much more hair away than hinting.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  In the third century, a Chinese court official named Zhang Yao invented a technique that would define calligraphy for the next 2,000 years. He called it Duan, the pause, a deliberate moment of pressure where the brush presses down, holds and then lifts or redirects. It was a way of encoding intention into the stroke itself, not just where the mark goes, but the weight of the decision before it moves. No original works by Zhang Yao survive. What survived was the technique itself, passed from hand to hand for 18 centuries.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  The pause became a kind of inherited intelligence, embodied, transmitted, alive. Su Wen Cheng recently discovered they are one of Zhang Yao's direct descendants. And in Recursions, a 10-meter scroll performed live at Art Basel Hong Kong with two robotic arms guided by EEG data. The pause returns in a new form, not in the wrist, but in the brainwave threshold that tells the robot when to act. Su Wen has been building toward this for more than a decade, not in theory, in ink.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Raised between Toronto and Hong Kong, trained at the MIT Media Lab and an artist in residence at Bell Labs and Google, Cheng has argued for something more demanding than AI art, that the machine can be a collaborator, that error can be generative, that technology can reveal as much about the human as it does about itself. They believe that to extend agency, we must understand the human sensorium and how technology changes what humans experience as we move through the world. In 2022, the Victorian Albert Museum acquired Memory, making it the first AI model collected by a major cultural institution.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  In 2023, time named Cheng one of the 100 most influential people in AI. Today's conversation is less about whether machines can make art than about what artists can teach us about living with intelligent systems. Su Wen Cheng is an artist, researcher and founder of Solicit. Welcome, Su Wen. So I've been looking forward to this since getting exposed to your art when we were in Seoul, Mayo at the Cucinelli event.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  What a beautiful event.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Yes, and so thank you for joining us on Possible.

• 3:21Speaker 00

  My pleasure.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Your father was an opera singer and your mother, a computer programmer.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  When did you realize that it wasn't choosing one of the inheritance, maybe the kind of parenting, but, but, but blending this together?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  I love that question because I think it's, it's really hard to choose between your parents. And I think early on, we all realize it's probably best not to. So in, in that way, you know, we were brought up with both languages in our household. And I think when you learn something from early childhood development and from those experiences, they become really part of the fabric of how you think about things, how you cognate, how you express. So I don't think there was ever really a moment in which I chose one side or the other. I grew up playing violin and piano, but also learning how to code. We had computers from a young age, so it always felt really natural. At the same time, I always thought that maybe through that,

• 4:20Speaker 00

  and maybe because I'm kind of a quiet person in general, I always thought that there's something that art and performance, that those mediums could express that language couldn't. So I just very much veered towards those directions.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Out of curiosity, because this is one of the things that affected me when I was young. Did you ever read Godel, Esher, Bach?

• 4:40Speaker 00

  I, I'm going to be quite honest with you, I tried.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  Okay, fair enough. It's like, braa.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's quite, I weaponized it in different ways. I tried and, but I'd love for you to tell me about it.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Well, so Hofstadter, genius book, Pulitzer Prize, thinks he's writing about human existence and consciousness and whatnot, which is part of where they kind of art and AI and all the places we're going.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  But it was also the parallels between, for example, you know, Godel, Esher and Bach. So you play music.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  You're, you know, do visual art. You think in computer science. So the same kind of parallels between these systems, like how you think the relationship between music and computer programming is kind of a classic. And so that was the reason it occurred to me that maybe you'd encountered it.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  You know, it's so funny. It's been so much ingrained in my experience. I'm, I consider myself an artist and researcher, but I'm, I just learn by doing. So I think it's been, you know, playing violin at such a young age and piano and learning with, through instruments, but also understanding that there's a really interesting world of digitization around sound and visual that happens also from a really young age. I think those parallels and that translation has really been a point of inspiration, of tension and of curiosity for the work. Because they're, they're kind of, they're readable in many different forms.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  No, exactly. And what we will get to, various forms of readability. But like, it seems that your kind of art practice and what you're building kind of started with the question of what happens when a robot draws alongside you? And so what did you expect and then what did you discover?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  That's such a great question. I, it, it started such a long time ago. It's funny to reflect on something from 10 years ago, 11 years ago. I was thinking through this moment in 2015, particularly when I was reading an article about Lisa Dole and AlphaGo. And Lisa Dole mentioned in his defeat to AlphaGo in this sort of landmark competition, he mentioned that even in defeat, he was incredibly inspired because he saw the beauty of the non-human move. And I, that was catalytic for me. That was really, really inspiring because the context was he had been defeated by a computer system,

• 7:12Speaker 00

  which didn't, we, we didn't think that was possible because he was the Mozart of the game, you know, which we all aspire to. If for a game that's been, been played for, since a time memorial, it seems. There's a few aspects of that that I found really interesting. One, as an engineer, how do we unpack this idea? How do we quantify the beauty of the non-human move? Is that even a sensical sort of direction to take artistic or technical development? Secondly, I thought there was something really, as I'm, as I'm older and I reflect on these different waves of AI and, and its conceptualization and culture, you're like, he's talking about seeing beauty after experiencing defeat.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  This sort of fatalistic to awe trajectory that was so, so incisive and, and really exciting to me. So at that point in time, I was thinking about being a drawer, being a performer and drawing through the interface of the computer and the screen and like the mouse and all these things, and feeling like the sense of a lack of embodiment to that translation of my mark into, you know, something that happens on screen. So I wanted to think about bringing it back into physical space, what that would mean. Like, I, I'm, I think it comes from playing violin at a young age and just understanding this expressive gesture. I wonder if it comes from my interest in calligraphy as well,

• 8:39Speaker 00

  this extension of the human subject through, through the line. So yeah, that really was the, I think that kernel from Lisa Dole. And I'm not a very good AlphaGo player, YK player at all, but I think that kernel really made me think that I wanted to explore what the beauty of the non-human move was for me.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Uh huh, yes.

• 9:00Speaker 00

  And, and I could achieve that through learning how to build robots and, and, and taking the one thing I knew, drawing and seeing what would come from it. So my area of expertise.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, most people's first impression when they encounter you is like, oh, what's important is the robot drawing.

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 01

  Right?

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Entirely.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Right. But what actually is important is the dynamic and what's happening with the human.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  So what's been that kind of lesson, that, that lesson of the dynamic by which the non-human move is also incorporated into the human move and then the dance that is your art?

• 9:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's so many things I've learned from engaging in this process durationally. Ten years is not a short amount of time. We've gone through seven generations of robotic development and artistic development. I would say where we address different themes and work with different sensors and different algorithms to bring a different type of gesture into the form. That being said, I think I've learned that there's a lot of beauty in the error state. And there's a lot of truth in the uncertainty of the of the mark making. That that again, it sometimes people say that the work feels really sci fi.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  You know, but I I actually always respond with and really believe that there's nothing fictional or speculative about any of the work that I do. It might feel that way, but I'm really trying to get at the materiality of these systems, at the materiality of the art form of drawing and of performance. So I really think there's something more true, not more fictitious about this idea of drawing and not really understanding what the system is outputting. There's something very, very interesting about the questions that also arise from that, which is what is machine readable? What where is what isn't? What does it mean to draw with one's own historical archives?

• 11:03Speaker 00

  All these, all these interesting lessons that I've gathered.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And what's been part of the journey for you? Because part of it, like one of the things that I think makes art really interesting is that personal quality.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  And so what is the thing like, what have you learned?

• 11:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  You know, on the journey?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  What have I learned? I've learned quite a lot. I know people like to think about optimism or pessimism. But one, one thing I learned, maybe not about myself, but about art in general, is that by engaging with this practice and by engaging with building these systems and understanding oneself as data and measuring all these things and and trying to make something maybe beautiful or true or gestural from it. It's been a way for me to hold fear and hope in the mind at the same time, because there's a lot of speculation around, there's a lot of hype and a lot of dystopia around this idea of the human and machine.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  It's been in Hollywood, it's been in contemporary media, it's been all over, you know.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Every major platform is talking, they have some stance of like pure optimism or pure dystopia, it seems. But I think for me, what I've learned is that there's ways to chart out what that actually means for you and how you live with it in your life and how you integrate or not integrate the things that you really care about into these contemporary systems and models.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  I love that answer. And I think the blend of thinking about, you know, to use kind of as a parallel to the yin and yang.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  And that's is, is, is what brings the human in honor of your work in the line between.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  Yes, there you go. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. The contour is the line between.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. So one of my super weaknesses is pronunciation. So I'm probably going to get this word wrong. But the Duen pause technique?

• 13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Duen pause technique.

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. That your ancestor, again, Zhong Yao?

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's great.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  Invented in two hundred and thirty C E, survives only because practitioners, right? Because not necessarily the work. So your recursion system carries your gestural archive forward through a neural network. So what does it mean that like, what, what another line between those, another yin and yang is like, this, one of the oldest techniques with now one of the newest? How would you kind of draw those lines?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  You know, I, there's so much mystery for me in how we connect to our past, how we, in the words of Audrey Tang, might be good ancestors, which I still find very incendiary. So what I'm interested in, in the recursion's system and what I recently showed and performed at Art Basel Hong Kong. And what I've been thinking through is how do we make decisions within a system? What direction of proposition that is non cognitive can I give the system that will allow it to draw or stop, right? Which is very similar to the pause technique performed by and originated by my ancestor.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  And I, and those developments have not been maybe developed in parallel because we occupy very different, we live in very different times to say it mildly. But when I realized that this was my ancestry ancestry and my genealogy and I realized that I've been really developing something that's quite related without that knowledge of that of his invention. I, I felt like there is a kind of recursive temporal inheritance happening. Because I, my interest in calligraphy doesn't come from a, an interest in or even the knowledge that this was my ancestor or my interest in drawing was very almost innate from when I was very young.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  But when I learned about this overlap, I'm, I'm excited and kind of nervous to talk about it because it, it felt so apt, it felt so layered and interesting. I've been working with my own archival data and bringing up my, you know, my parentage when I think about my practice. And it was, it was exciting to relate something as ancient and as substantive as calligraphy to the marks that I'm making with my performative gestures.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  That's awesome. And one of the things that you said recently is to become a machine collaborator, you've had to become machine readable. So I want to come back to this because you were, you've gestured a couple of times the readability. It feels much more of a, of a gesture at modern life, right? Through art. So, so say a little bit about like how you, you've had to make yourself machine readable? What's been the kind of learnings from that?

• 16:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:06Speaker 01

  And, and then kind of how does that go to art and then to kind of part of kind of the gesture at the human experience?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  Absolutely. So, so when I, I do a little bit of mentorship for different artists and I always talk about like, there's so many tools, there's so many opportunities, there's so many possibilities with how we work or don't work with technology today. And, and I found like, what's the meaning making engine for my own work? It's drawing. It's, it's most simple. So when I, in two thousand and fifteen, decided to train a return neural network on two decades of my drawing data, I was like, this is the thing I care about. This is the thing I know. This is the thing I understand in, in my bones. What does it mean to digitize that work from the level of volume? Like, what is the labor involved? What are the challenges?

• 16:57Speaker 00

  What, for instance, in that very specific example, at that point, you couldn't get, maybe that's why I'm obsessed with time, but you couldn't get the pauses of the gesture. You would only be able to read the drawing as a sort of finished image that you need to reverse engineer. So a lot of the decision making pathways of the data are not available because we, because it's just not. So I developed from then a tool that allowed me to trace the pauses, to trace the time, to put the time back in the data of drawing. And, and in that way, it's been really rewarding for me to think through the nuts and bolts of what makes art or what makes art not machine readable and what parts are readable

• 17:42Speaker 00

  and legible to the system and what parts aren't? And what parts do we want to be legible to the system? And, and what parts don't we want to be legible? So that's been really educational. It's been really grounded because I think a lot of the times, I think fear comes from this sense of, of a lack of specificity. Because you're just afraid of all of it, especially when it comes to machines replacing artists and that automation cycle. So in that way, it's given me a real sense of grounding and also this idea that I can train my own muscle memory by working, by putting what is machine readable in my drawing

• 18:26Speaker 00

  back towards the space of the canvas as a collaborator.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  So you make yourself very machine readable. Is there anything?

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Somewhat, yeah.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  You want to not make machine readable? And, and kind of where is that kind of, I don't know if it's negative space, but all alternative or human space, anything in that trend?

• 18:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think oftentimes, and I, I think we'll, we'll get to some issues of like, human presence versus not later on too. But one, one way in which I'm not interested in being machine readable is for me, the work that I'm doing is about my own learning in a way. So I don't want to be machine executable, maybe is the right word. So I think there's a lot of artists and, and projects that extend.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Personal data into a drawing machine. We've seen that quite a lot. There's a lot of art historical precedence for it. And sometimes people think that's what I'm interested in doing. But for me, it's really about creating the conditions of relation and the feedback loop between human and machine. So I'm never creating or designing or authoring myself out of the equation. And that's been my north star. Because I don't want, why would I want to build a system that takes the way, takes away the thing I love the most from me, you know? So and I can say to this day, I draw more than I ever have. And I also work, have worked with these systems

• 19:59Speaker 00

  and for maybe a little bit longer than a lot of people. So I think there's a world where both can exist.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  Well, 2015 is definitely well before most people had realized an AI revolution was coming.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, people, people I think thought I was, they were a little bit concerned when I was making this project because it wasn't, it wasn't in the dialogue at the time. It was a very different, it's like real time graphics, maybe starting to be a little bit of gaming interest. But but that feedback loop has been at the center of what I'm curious about for a long time.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Well, the other aspect of this, you know, kind of putting the timing back in is that LLMs, neural networks are actually pretty bad at concepts of time. Right? Like if you

• 20:44Speaker 00

  That's so true.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Yes. And so, so say a little bit about the temporal experience because that's actually one of the places where, again, where you kind of say, well, what is quintessentially human in the, in the place between and the expression and the dance? Could say a little bit about that temporal element and what you've learned on that?

• 21:01Speaker 00

  When I brought this idea of time and that pause in was when I started working with EEG. And that was during the pandemic because I did not want to draw anymore. It was, it was quite, you know, it was a dark time for everyone. I think, I think a lot of creative people and a lot of artists and just people in general felt quite unmoored, to say it mildly. So I really went to meditation to, as not a creative outlet, but just an existential outlet, maybe. And I wanted to train a way to enhance and deepen my sense of the alpha state threshold, which is the state that you're in when you are in deep meditation.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  So I wanted to create a configuration that allowed me to do that. So I actually developed the system, the spectral system, paints only when I'm at that alpha state threshold and it doesn't when I'm not. Which maybe for, for the tradition of meditation, maybe that's somewhat blasphemous. But I found it was a nice way of enacting a non-conscious type of control that wasn't gestural. And control is not really the right word here, but maybe understanding proprioception. And, and I use that to, to make a pause meaningful and sort of sensible. And I found, I don't know how it is for you,

• 22:28Speaker 00

  but I think creativity happens in the silence or imagination and real reflection happens in the quiet and the pauses. And I'm not surprised sometimes that some of these LLMs don't really understand that even in that feedback loop between human and system, there needs to be, I was joking with a friend of mine today about, you know, wouldn't it be nice to just sit in silence? There's so much, there's so much that can happen in those pregnant pauses that I really wanted to bring that back into the data set and back into the space of drawing.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  So what if you had to quantify about yourself? And then what have you, if anything, have you deliberately kind of held back to protect yourself in your work?

• 23:14Speaker 00

  I try to restrict myself to movement, whether that's my own electrical signal movement or my, or my gestural movement. I do so because it's this constraint that creates a lot of adaptations that I find really interesting. I like that constraint because I build my world through movement and line. And I also, I'm interested in writing and speech and image, but that's a very different thing. I love the focus of seeing what I'm made of in movement.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And is there any, is there anything that you've begun thinking about since you're both a program thinker and also a, you know, like an experience thinker, where a language of that movement?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  I'm starting to think about what that might look like, actually. But it almost feels like notation plus, you know, I, I show the work and the data set as its own art piece. I've been converting my brainwave signals into Fasta format, like a genomic sequence. So I'm really starting to play with what, what that encoding looks like. I think it's super interesting. But I just know that it's, maybe I have too much respect for the, for language and maybe poetry, but I like keeping almost text. I love that like inscription version of thinking about text versus like a more verbal version of it.

• 24:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I, I look forward to your extending that line and drawing a line. So you have this Drawing Operations Unit Generation series, robotic systems trained on your gestural archive, which we've been talking about, built to draw with you, then simply execute a command. I don't know if you refer to it as Doug deliberately. Is it a personification? Is it like what, what's with the, how the name? And then how the name becomes also part of that, that kind of non-human gesture along with the human gesture?

• 25:16Speaker 00

  You know, that has really changed a lot through time. And I miss those playful days sometimes because I think in the beginning, I've been thinking about anthropomorphization. I was thinking about that quite a lot in the early days because I didn't know so much about how anything really worked. I have more of a computer science background, not a robotics background at the time. So a lot of these kinematic levers, I didn't really understand yet. I just projected a lot onto the system. And Drawing Operations Unit Generation 1, Doug 1, sounds a little bit like Su Quan. And it felt very cheeky. It kind of felt playful. It felt weird. It brought a lot of strange dimension to the first experiment

• 26:00Speaker 00

  that I think was such a gift, looking back, because I'm, I think the work can be really serious, but there is a playfulness to it that sometimes we don't get to have in our everyday. You know, we talk about these big topics about humanity and machines and the future of work. And there was a playfulness in the very beginning that I really still enjoyed, maybe a playful ignorance. Because I did anthropomorphize quite a lot and everyone joined in. We had gallery curators and museum staff being like, how's Doug? And I still love that, actually. But it's given, it's given another entry point to robotic development, to this, this dialogue that I'm, I still really cherish.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Is there anything in the, in this play? Because I do, there's a, you're probably familiar, there's a, there's multiple theories of it's not Homo sapiens, it's like Homo ludens, like we're playing. Is there anything in that play that has illustrated for you both kind of some aspects of human humanity and some access of like, and like, as it were, machine readability and interaction?

• 27:12Speaker 00

  Sure. I think this, this particular maybe projection has taught me a lot more about art than, than developing robots, actually. Because I, I talked about how these systems are us in another form. And I, I don't, how do I phrase this? I think so much of that early conception of Doug as a sort of discrete unit was very much my own projection. And that's what people bring to the work as well. And I feel like that's a deeply human trait. I think it's one that comes from empathy. It's one that comes from imagination. And, and so much, and so much of the work,

• 27:54Speaker 00

  it's like this machinic other that's of my design and authorship and creation that, that I think can be a really beautiful thing. I think that's what art is. You know, that's what artists bring to their, their mediums. And the same can be said for robotics as well.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  And so one of the beautiful, I think, expressions and another, maybe I'm overusing, overusing the gesture metaphor, but I love it.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  I'm here for it.

• 28:23Speaker 01

  Yes. But one of the things is the earliest Doug introduced some deviations. And your response was to say, no, this is poeticizing error. Say a little bit more about that. And that phrase of poeticizing error is something that I think I may, you know, plagiarize.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, please do, please do. You heard it here first. No, I, I really do think it was such a gift, that first generation, because I, I don't, I don't think I really knew what I was doing when I first started performing this interaction, this drawing with Doug in 2015 in a dark basement with a quite janky robot, actually. And, and, and when I think about poeticizing the error, it was a gift that came from the fact that I performed it live as one of its first iterations. And it was a gift that came from the audience because in tech development, you don't poeticize error. It's always a bug. It's not a feature.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  But in, in that performative moment, I knew I wanted to explore something very real and gestural and responsive. But when things didn't work according to the simulation that I had sort of on the side, people really responded to it, to that moment, that error, with a lot of empathy, with a lot of delight. And that was a really strange spectacle at the moment, in the moment as a performer. Because we were all kind of hallucinating through this sort of machinic other in a way. But as a visual artist and as a developer, I realized that

• 30:07Speaker 00

  If there wasn't error in that interaction, it would be really uninteresting because I would have nothing to adapt to. And it would just be, um, the first generation was a mirroring of my own gestures. So without that error distortion, it was sort of like an artistic style of the robot at the time. Um, it made it quite dynamic. And, um, that really gave me a lot of permission to develop more ambitiously and widely. Because I'm like, if, if something that's barely working can spark all these creative ideas for myself and for an audience, um, then there's really something here that's really potent.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  And, and how, if you've given any thought to this, would you, uh, help other people generalize using art as a lead? Whether it's other human interaction with chatbots, maybe with hallucinations, right? Uh, labs is what they're trying to do in alignment training. How would you say, hey, uh, echoing forward this art, this gesture of poeticizing error? Here's a good way for people to think about how to approach their own interactions with AI.

• 31:17Speaker 00

  I think a lot of that comes from a little bit building from the ground up. There's a lot of optimization that can happen when you use more of these maybe proprietary and off the shelf tools. But I think when you really think from the ground up, you can think about more sustainable materials for, uh, different types of sensory development. You can think about low cost, low compute models. And then you can think really have a, a stronger dialogue with, um, the artistic intent, which is always gonna, you know, I've, I've been saying lately that artists are great at breaking things. And when you break things, you sort of separate what's really essential from what's necessary and, and find new directions.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  So I think there's something about building from the ground up and, and, you know, working with people who think quite outside of, um, an engineering format, which can sometimes be artists.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Oh, exactly. Um, so if you had one afternoon with the heads of the frontier AI labs, what's a habit or a practice from the art studio that you would want them to try?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  I really believe in embracing uncertainty. I think there's something much more true in not knowing what you're doing in a way. And, uh, and I think build something that's made to be broken and interesting at the same time.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  So most AI teams optimize for capability, speed, engagement, depth of knowledge. So what's the, what's another interesting metric? From kind of a human machine system? From your and an artist's perspectives, it's like, is it more agency? More attention, more of that, you know, kind of the, the, the, the dynamic of, of mutual readability? What would be some like, in addition to the kind of the, because you also of course have an engineer's mindset.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  You understand the classic thing, but what's the, what's like some kind of, um, other things that you would say, put these in your feedback functions?

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Sure, sure. Uh, you know, that's a great question. Um, and maybe it's, it's so, um, organically coming from our conversation that thinking about reduction, thinking about pauses, what happens? I think when you feel like as a developer, you can build anything, then you, you may not really know where you're going, right? You don't have that intention. And I think there's something about reduction, pauses, silence, that, that can be its own feature and can be its own, um, characteristic of, of how we build these loops, a pause, um, a moment of silence, or maybe even a reduction of functionality in order to get, you know, the user to input differently.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Cause right now it feels like everything's vast. It's a magic, a magic machine.

• 34:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  But that, I think there's something really powerful and unexpected in that reduction.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. And actually some, something also, like in the kind of dance, I could also see is like, there probably is some pattern where it isn't just take chatbot. You prompt and it just gives you an answer, kind of like a vending machine. But does something else that adds a little bit of variability and a little bit of difference and a little bit of, you know, like a, something of a dance move into the equation.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  And, and sort of like, what's a, what's a low or no stimulation response? That, that can initiate or instigate something really surprising in like, not the user. I don't like that terminology, but you know, the, the partner or whatnot, that I think it's unexplored because it's not the temporal register we really exist in, in 2026, but I think it's something we're all craving.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Well, speaking of words, um, you describe, uh, your work as operational art.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And not AI art.

• 35:22Speaker 00

  I do, yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  And, and say a little bit about why the, the, the, the naming difference is important and, and kind of what should someone see from that?

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Sure. Yeah. So I'm, I've been thinking through this. I'm building it out as I go, like I do everything. Um, and it really comes from drawing operations and the, the 10 year journey it's been, the 10 year journey it will be. Um, and knowing that it's been really this, um, set of protocols. It's been different types of data. It's been different experiences that have gone into the building of a much wider system or operation, um, that really drives what I think of as our operational art. I think in that you can thread together, it's a little bit like systems art for 2026.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Um, in that we recognize that there are so many different, um, loops that all artists, um, and people, uh, uh, are, um, it, all these different loops that people interweave to author their work. There's research with, um, obviously different agents. There's drawing, there's programming, there's robotics. There's all these, um, spheres that layer onto a wider practice. So I'm still trying to figure out the language for this, um, thinking of operational art, but it's one that's meant to be inclusive of and a rejection of these traditional and technological differences.

• 36:54Speaker 00

  And just thinking about it all as a series of operations. So, yeah.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  No, makes sense. Um, so, uh, in spectral, uh, the robot is not just responding to you, but participating in the production. So it's much more co-regulation than assistance. So, um, what is that preview about where we think AI systems might be going? And whether, and I think your answer is going to be both, whether we should be excited or alarmed by it. But what, given the earlier things, my guess is you're going to say some version of both.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. I, I think, I love that you use the word co-regulation because I think there is this, um, intertwining of these systems in our nervous system, like that we're, we may not be fully aware of yet. I'm exploring that in how I link my, uh, robotic system to my EEG. Um, but there are ways in which we can co-regulate, but there are ways in which working with these feedback loops can also really disrupt. So it's a little bit from column A, a little bit from column B. Um, but I do think, uh, that's the direction we're heading. Um, and it's useful to be mindful of it, but also understand that we can create configurations

• 38:16Speaker 00

  that deepen experiences we want, like meditation and like drawing.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  Well, like the alpha state for the drawing. Yeah. So, um, is there anything, some people say, oh, AI is just a tool. Is there anything that you would say, no, no, this is the important thing you need to understand beyond just a tool?

• 38:36Speaker 00

  We've always as a species evolved through our practices and our tools. Our tools are not just, I think, and that's something that artists know. A paintbrush is not just a paintbrush. It is something that we profoundly become through and express through. And we create our reality through these paintbrushes and through these words and through these conversations. So, um, so in that way, I see a vast horizon of possibility when it comes to breaking apart and exploring our own ways of making tools. Um, but I think there is the making component that I'm quite maybe bullish on, which is that I think when you work with any tool, you work with someone else's system.

• 39:19Speaker 00

  And I really love building my own systems and tools for expression because that's where all the, that's where all the meat of it is. That's where all the curiosity is for me. It's not shifting from platform to platform because of the promise of automation, of certain tasks that really makes for creative, um, excitement for me.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of the things that the, the co-regulation, like when it's a dance and when you have the kind of the, the, you know, kind of the joint participation, you know, has a kind of a, I know, a beauty. One, in your own work, do you ever worry that, that that kind of creates any missteps in the dance? Maybe it's just poising error. And then two is, given that most people are going to use AI systems that they're not creating. Right? What is the nature of that dance? And like people worry about whether or not it's manipulation.

• 40:14Speaker 00

  Of course, yeah.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Right? So, and, and any, you know, kind of thoughts or reflections on that?

• 40:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think that's, it's, what, one thing I found really fascinating about presenting the work in this way, through the lens of performance is that there's a lot of projection from other people that comes. Sometimes people think that I'm, um, in love with the robot. Sometimes people think that I'm its mother, like, but those are all reflections that people bring onto their work. Um, I don't know if I think about it as a dance really, I think of it as a gestural co-negotiation in some ways. But there's a lot of tension in the performance of the work. Um, there's a lot of error in the performance of the work. Um, it, that I think really, um, communicates more of what it actually is to work with some of these tools, which is, it's not always harmony. It's sometimes it's psychosis, you know?

• 41:06Speaker 00

  And I think it's good to keep in mind, um, both for me in the work. It's a way to remind myself of that. Um, in performance, there's a lot at stake, um, within that frame. So I think part of what the work brings is, is that kind of reality.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  What do you think is the most challenging thing people get wrong when they think about AI as just a tool?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  People think that tools, AI tools are static, but they're not. They're adaptive. And we're also adapting to this tool that's constantly changing. So I think it's about understanding that process of mutual adaptation and dynamism towards the future that we want.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Awesome. I totally agree. One of the things also that I've been very curious to ask you about. So you've said that working with AI has made you aware of the limits of the human sensorium. And that, you know, things like climate solutions may require a broader or more interconnected way of sensing than our bodies alone provide.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Say more.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  I have to credit Ed Young a little bit with this because it's, it's obviously working with these tools and understanding that different, like cameras can see in infrared and we can't, but so can dogs. Like there's a vast human sensorium that we can sense through, sense synthetically, synthetically. We can sense synthetically that also exist in non-human animal species, for instance. And I think that's a really humbling way of thinking about our own faculties, our own sensory apparatus, knowing it's our limitations, knowing that we only see the world in a really

• 43:03Speaker 00

  specific way as a species, even beyond the cultural lenses that kind of divide us. I think that's really humbling. It's really exciting, but it's also as a, as a person, not even as an artist or engineer, I think knowing that we want to uncover and explore radically different ways of sensing and sense-making in order to have a broader view of what it means to be in this present moment.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And so if, if you were kind of saying, like, here is the way policymakers, other folks, would you have them like, kind of come do a performance like the ones you do? To watch a performance, to do almost socialist theater and participate in a performance? What would be the way to kind of try to broaden that human sensorium? So just kind of, kind of goodness.

• 44:03Speaker 00

  I think we, it's quite imaginative, I think, some of these suggestions. Even thinking about the sense, the human sensorium is incredibly meta, you know? And, and I love it, but, and I really do believe this. I've, as an artistic practitioner, as an artist, I think artists are also trying to pull the threads of our reality a little bit, extend that sensorium in their own ways. There's a lot of imagination around that, that I think really, this is going to sound like such a cop-out because of my position, but I think really, really engage with, with art and artistic practice.

• 44:44Speaker 00

  Because I think artists are always, are already existing on a kind of a different plane. It makes artists be thought of as outliers, or divergent, or, or deviant, or whatever. But I think that way of thinking beyond what is known is very much a mandate of the form of the practice. And I think engaging with that is a way to expand that a little bit.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  No, exactly. And, and like, one of the other things about your work is because of a focus on empathy and care. And obviously with machines, people find that a little strange because they go, well, the machine doesn't have empathy, the machine is mechanical, et cetera.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  What are some of the, what's the kind of surface of this? Where this kind of, you know, co-regulation?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  Sure, yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Helps the lens on empathy and care?

• 45:39Speaker 00

  You know, I, I sometimes think it's really about the development of the human subject in a way. It's you don't care about something because, not always because you want to affect a change in, in that entity, because they could know it or not, or whatever. You, you, you create these loops, you know, to enact that sense in you. And I think we need more mechanisms for enacting that empathy engine in ourselves. And I genuinely really believe that we need more systems like that, because we have a lot of anxiety-producing engines already. There's other, there are alternatives that can be about empathy, care, awareness, expanding the sensorium.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  There's a lot of different ways to engage.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  I mean, you, you, you bring a number of different fusions together in your art. So there's a kind of fusion, it's not just drawing, it's time, the fusion is not just human, it's a human. It's, it's, it's a question between human and machine. And what is the, you know, the kind of, the non-human or a-human gesture in this? And, and part of it is also performance. But, you know, obviously there's a, there's a number of different places where your art, well, you know, does, your practice does end up, it's, you know, museum, the fair, et cetera.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  Is there anything in the shift of modalities that you think something gets lost? And, and where is that kind of, like, that, that sense of that lost space? And what's the, what's the thing that people should pay attention to there?

• 47:21Speaker 00

  It's really interesting, actually, because we're, I'm thinking through that exact question a lot, and I don't have an answer. But I, how I would frame it for what I'm interested in exploring is this idea of the human presence as something that is felt without the human, my presence being there. I talk about collaboration, I talk about co aesthetic systems and this sort of relational mode that I've been building with the system. It almost demands that the, and you asked this question earlier too, that the person be kind of in, standing in my shoes, inside the loop. We're still figuring out how to bring that into the space of installation, because I can't be there all the time, you know?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  One person, one body.

• 48:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. But the system is built for it. I think maybe that might be the next 10 years of thinking how we can, I don't really like the word interactive, but how we can bring in the hu- human presence into the work a little bit more, that sense of time a little bit more. And I think there's this type of fragility there too, because human bodies are inherently fragile. So it's definitely, I don't necessarily think of it as a problem to solve, but if it is, it's not one that we've solved quite yet, but we're working on it.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  So I think I've gotten this right. One of the things you've said is these systems don't possess an agency in a mystical sense, but they reflect back our choices, our biases, and knowledge. Do I have that right? And how would you elaborate or change what I just said?

• 48:55Speaker 00

  You know, I, I think a lot of times, when I started using the sort of phrase human and machine collaboration, like, a very long time ago, it didn't mean what maybe people think it means now. I think a lot of times when people think about, you talked about mysticism, collaboration, they think that the implication is like robotic or machine extensions? And that's not my implication. That's not how I'm evoking that word. For me, it's about extended authorship. It's much more Haraway than Hinton, if you would, you know? It's this idea that we are not just single authors of our own journeys, but we are a collection of all that came before and all that will come. Not, not at the risk of sounding too poetic, but, you know, I am a product of two parents

• 49:39Speaker 00

  with these interests of two cultures. And that's really informed how I think of everything, really. And, and in that way, yeah, that's how I think about collaboration and this extension of authorship in the work.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  One of the things that I was particularly interested in in this is how does that kind of change either your sense of agency, or how we should think about human agency?

• 50:05Speaker 00

  You know, it links back to this idea of the human sensorium, right? Because our agency comes from our ability to sense the world and make sense of the world around us. I feel like those ideas are really linked. So if we can expand our, our own sensorium, we can expand our sense of agency, because we have more information to work with. We're fundamentally changing beings when we expand what we can perceive.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Awesome. So rapid fire section. Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?

• 50:37Speaker 00

  There is a book by Emmanuel Kocia about metamorphosis. I'm reading a lot about metamorphosis these days because I'm doing a project on silkworms. And Kocia extends metamorphosis to all creatures beyond the caterpillar, and really makes this claim, it's almost kind of Buddhist in a way, that we are all experiencing metamorphosis and are all part of this larger metamorphic cycle that is really grounded in, in science, but also really, really exciting philosophically.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  That doesn't surprise me, given the, the, you know, the human and machine co-regulation.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  And I will, first time I've ever heard of that book, I'm going to go get it.

• 51:20Speaker 00

  Yes, please, please. I'd love to send it to you, actually.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Awesome. What's a question that you wish people would ask you more often?

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I wish people would ask me, what happens when things go wrong? Because I think a lot of times people believe that it's only about the good days, it's only about when there's harmony in the interaction. I think a lot of what the work has come from has been a sense of tension, has been this error state, has been this, this groundedness in, in the reality of, of co-creation that I wish people would ask me about more.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  And where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry? Let's call that art, robotics, and AI that inspires you?

• 52:05Speaker 00

  You know, I am doing a lot of research into silk proteins and the discovery that they allow for technology to be biocompatible with the human body, which I think raises a lot of really interesting existential questions about where the human begins and the machine ends, because there's a

• 52:29Speaker 00

  There's a layer there that we're really uncovering. I'm also really interested in robotics and medicine. There's a lot of really powerful work in robotic surgery that has saved a lot of lives. That is a really good example of allowing for the specificity of robotic movement to really enact a human intention, which is saving lives. So I thought that was really beautiful.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  I completely agree. So can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible achieve? If everything breaks humanity's way in the next 15 years? And what's our first step to set off on that journey?

• 53:08Speaker 00

  It's a really beautiful question. And I was thinking about another piece of media that I really love. This film that's based off a short story by Ted Chiang called Story of Your Life: Arrival. And I love that. I love that movie because in it, when Amy Adams, fellow Canadian, when her character learns the language of the aliens, it expands her conception of time. And it actually gives her this expanded awareness and gift that she then teaches to the rest of the world. And I think there's something about education and learning and inhabiting practice that I would love to see.

• 53:50Speaker 00

  Learning the language of different species and technologies that allow for a broader worldview.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  That is really awesome. And by the way, I also love that work. I made a point, I was at a conference last month that Ted was at. So I made a point to go meet him.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 54:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  Incredible. So was he cool?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  He was cool. Totally worth it.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  That's very cool. I hope to meet him one day as well.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Well, easy enough to facilitate. So it's been an honor and a pleasure. And it's our, call it our first gesture at a conversation.

• 54:26Speaker 00

  Sounds wonderful. Looking forward to the next one. Thank you, Reid.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Possible is produced by Palette Media. It's hosted by Ari Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Sean Young. Possible is produced by Tenasi Delos, Katie Sanders, Spencer Strasmore, Imo Zhu, Amon Suri, Lexi Kevin, Danny Garrison, Trent Barboza, and Tafadzwa Nima Rundwe.

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Special thanks to Surya, Yala Manchili, Sayida Sabieva, Ian Alice, Greg Beato, Parth Patel, and Ben Ralas.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  And a big thanks to Natalie Stone, Tessa Nijdam, Arena Ermaikova, the Scilicet team, fellowship, Restra, and the team at Mosaic Ventures for hosting the conversation.