How Sougwen Chung teaches robots to pause

**Sougwen Chung** (0:00)
I've been converting my brainwave signals into a genomic sequence. 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 away the thing I love the most from me?
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 Hinton.

**Reid Hoffman** (0:31)
In the third century, a Chinese court official named Zhang Yao invented a technique that would define calligraphy for the next 2000 years.
He called it Duen, 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. The pause became a kind of inherited intelligence, embodied, transmitted, alive.
Sougwen Chung 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. Sougwen has been building toward this for more than a decade. Not in theory, in INC.
Raised between Toronto and Hong Kong, trained at the MIT Media Lab, and an artist-in-residence at Bell Labs and Google, Chung 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 Victoria and Albert Museum acquired memory, making it the first AI model collected by a major cultural institution. In 2023, Taimeng 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. Sougwen Chung is an artist, researcher and founder of SILICET. Welcome, Sougwen. So I've been looking forward to this since getting exposed to your art when we were in Sole Mio at the Cuccinelli event.

**Sougwen Chung** (3:17)
What a beautiful event.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:18)
Yes. And so thank you for joining us on Possible.

**Sougwen Chung** (3:21)
My pleasure.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:21)
Your father was an opera singer and your mother a computer programmer. When did you realize that it wasn't choosing one of the inheritance, maybe the parenting, but blending this together?

**Sougwen Chung** (3:36)
I love that question because I think 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 that way, 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, and maybe because I'm 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.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:32)
I had a curiosity because this is one of the things that affected me when I was young. Did you ever read Gertrude Lescher Bach?

**Sougwen Chung** (4:41)
I'm going to be quite honest with you. I tried. Okay.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:44)
Fair enough. It's like, brah.

**Sougwen Chung** (4:45)
Yeah. I weaponized it in different ways. I tried, but I'd love for you to tell me about it.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:52)
Well, so Hofstadter, genius book, Pulitzer Prize, things 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. Yeah. But it was also the parallels between, for example, Gerdl Ascher and Bach. So you play music.