About this episode

Sougwen Chung discusses their journey of collaborating with robots in art and the philosophical implications of machine creativity.

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…

People in this episode

Host: Reid Hoffman

Guest: Sougwen Chung

Topics covered

• robotics
• art
• creativity
• machine learning
• collaboration
• operational art

Keywords

• D.O.U.G.
• neural network
• creative partner
• machine-readable
• operational art
• brainwaves
• calligraphy
• intelligent systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Mosaic Ventures, NTT InterCommunication Center Tokyo, New INC, Nokia Bell Labs, Scilicet

More episodes of Possible

• Can we defend against AI hacks? | Dozie Anazia · September 9, 2026 · 41 min
• Training robots for a world they’ve never seen · September 2, 2026 · 59 min
• Inside an AI-powered personal dashboard | Matthew Tiemann · August 26, 2026 · 32 min
• The whole studio is one guy | Jonathan Brazeau · August 19, 2026 · 32 min
• Making taxes fun with Pikachu and AI | Cadi Zhang · August 12, 2026 · 35 min
• The artist using AI to sell brands | Joe Salvatore · July 29, 2026 · 37 min

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Possible podcast page.