AI Portraits

Emerging Faces

embodied autonomous creativity

Recognized as the first instance of paintings autonomously created by a robot, this series began with pure experiment. The artist gave his system just two instructions:

1. 01Imagine a human face and paint it on the canvas.
2. 02Stop as soon as you recognize a face.

This experiment allowed the interaction between GANs, physical paint, robotics and feedback loops to produce artworks that emerged from the system itself. By integrating the paint's chaotic physical inputs into the digital system, Van Arman pushed past the barrier of algorithmic determinism, creating an opening for a truly autonomous process to unfold. What emerged are haunting traces of machine creativity.

Only 44 canvases from this period remain.

First Sparks

emergence becomes a language

After the initial experiment, Van Arman was commissioned by VIEWS to make 128 paintings for the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. These works represent a formalization of Van Arman's robotic emergence process, and it received first prize in the 2018 International Robot Art Competition.

AI Imagined Faces On-Chain

the elegance of constraint

This project looks at the atomic elements of emergence in Van Arman's process, translating it into six perceptual fragments that constitute the system's sense of the threshold where a face appears. The technical constraint of on-chain storage refines the execution into a poetic expression of the system's essence.

Reflection

the full process goes on chain

This series pushes further into the possibilities of blockchain as a medium for novel artistic processes. Here, Van Arman executes his full reflective AI process through actions that take place on chain. Dozens of custom algorithms, as well as inputs taken from the system's physical interactions, are translated to Solidity, the coding language of Ethereum, and combined with seed hashes to allow an emergent process to unfold through 22 layers of randomness. The density of detail in these works derives from the masterful vector construction, a strikingly intricate and vibrant construction.