Self Portrait 2024 - Feedback

I did my first “self-portrait” of a robot back in 2006.

Thought it was an interesting idea and was always looking for things to paint. This was an early piece when it came to my painting robots. The robots themselves were made of wood and parts I found at the hardware store and junk yard. This particular robot head was made with a solenoid from a dishwasher. I still have it on my desk as a paper weight.

An everyone knows how over the years I kept making my robots better and better, adding more and more AI. With this early piece, the most significant AI algorithm was k-means clustering, which is such a basic algorithm, most people don’t even think of it as AI anymore.

The biggest advance in my robot’s AI came sometime around 2010 when I added cameras to watch itself paint and use what it was painting as feedback for the next strokes. Then around 2014 Deep Learning came, then GANS and the rest is what most people understand as AI Art these days.

Throughout this time I have made a number of “robot Self Portraits” - Each focusing in the advances my robot’s had recently made towards full autonomy. Most have been minted on SuperRare, though I imagine I have lost many to the trash bin in my studio.

Since 2010 all my robot art has been agentic, which is the current buzz word. And I used to describe how each painting was painted by dozens of creative agents fighting with one another for control of the brush, the winning agent making the next strokes. And I would talk about how the agents did different things like measure contrast, look at complementary colors, add a dose of green at the end, and even decide when a painting was done. Two dozen different agents fighting over the aesthetic outputs of the robots, making decisions based on live feedback, and creating art “organically”.

No one ever understood what I was talking about really. Once had a popular curator tell me “This would be interesting if you could get the robots to make their own aesthetic decisions.” To which I enthusiastically replied “They are, and I have published the code for anyone to see.“ But without giving what I said any thought they dismissively said “That’s not possible.”

So I always tried to simplify the description looking for something more easily understandable and came up with Feeback and Reflection. Instead of saying my robots had two dozen agents, I simplified it to two agents. An Expressive Painter, and a Precise Drawer. Then I split up the robot’s algorithms into either expressive and precise and had the Painting Agent and Drawing Agent go back and forth with each others work.

Here is what that looks like in my most recent work Self-Portrait 2024 - Feedback

Begin by using Deep Learning to imagine a portrait then

Paint Expressively…

Draw Precisely…

Paint Expressively…

Draw Precisely…

Paint Expressively…

many many times…

Until an independent Agent looks at the canvas and decides the painting is done.

This is how we can teach machines to see like us, but like I often say when AI begins to truly create its own, art for themselves, I doubt we will even be able to perceive it. And while I don’t know what it will create, I am almost certain it will not be a painting of its physical self.

But until then we have my robot’s self portraits where the actual robots are an important part of the creative process.

Self-Portrait 2024 - Feedback

All my painting robots have been agentic since 2010. It is interesting to watch the current evolution of the term into what people are beginning to understand agentic as. It is not just chatbots, and never has been. Agentic has always been about breaking down hard problems into smaller problems and writing AI Agents to handle the small problems. Once it can solve all the hard problems, through smaller problems, you have a mind - what is now sort of being called an Agentic Framework.

Interesting thought just now.

Have always thought of the artificially creative mind I have built as a large collection of independent creative agents, exactly as Minsky described in his seminal work Society of Mind. Should I instead be thinking of this synthetic mind as a custom Agentic Framework.

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Faces in the Darkness

In 2017 I created the first of a series projects where I gave my robot two simple instructions.

1: Imagine a human face and paint it.
2: Stop painting as soon as it recognized a face.

The algorithm was inspired by conversations I had with Harold Cohen, a pioneer in artificial creativity. He argued that AI didn’t truly create art—but merely filtered preexisting imagery, like Photoshop. But I had begun working with a new kind of neural network called GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) and noticed that they were “imagining” things very similar to how humans imagined. I shared this view with Cohen and tried to convince him that maybe machines could finally be creative.

Cohen passed in 2016 before I could finish our conversation, but his critiques ultimately sparked this series where I believe my robots began to truly be creative. The synthetically creative systems that emerged was an attempt to see the world through the eyes of AI.

The first set of portraits in this series consisted of 32 paintings that I ended up calling Emerging Faces.

Emerging Faces (32 11x14 inch Acrylic on Canvas Works)

Shortly after the first set, I was invited to an event during the Tribeca Film Festival called Views. It was a small private event where I was commissioned to create 128 similar works to be given away to the VIP attendees. These works were called The First Sparks of Artificial Creativity and painted on archival paper.

Almost all 128 were given away, though I kept a handful for myself. I also recorded each work as transferable assets on the BTC blockchain in 2018 and released them as NFTs for SuperRare’s first collection drop.

First Sparks of Artificial Creativity (128 11”x14” Acrylic on Archival Paper Works)

AI Imagined Portrait Painted by a Robot #2

Parallel to First Sparks and over the next several years I completed a handful of similar works (mostly 9”x12”) for commission and display various events and exhibitions around the world.

The most notable of these works was AI Imagined Portrait Painted by a Robot #2 (minted on SuperRare in 2018). This work was part of the winning entry that was awarded First Place in RobotArt 2018. In addition it was accepted into LACMAs permanent collection.

In 2023 a new version of this series was revealed during Bright Moments Tokyo that had a purely digital aspect called AI Imagined Faces. While all previous faces were physically painted until a face was recognized, this collection imagined both physical and digital faces.

AI Imagined Faces (100 Fully Onchain NFTs / 148 Physicals)

The 100 digital works were recorded 100% onchain and distributed as part of the Bright Moments Tokyo event in 2023. There were also 128 6”x6” canvases that were related to, but independent of the digital work. These were given to owners of the onchain NFTs, though not all were claimed and many remained in my possession.

While I do not plan to make anymore in this particular style, the series is not over and continues with the more complicated Reflection portraits and my newly developed metallic paintings.

Pindar

Texture Texture Texture

In art school they bang in the idea of Texture Texture Texture, which is of course hard to achieve with digital works. Layers and layers of overlays are a technique that I have found to achieve it.

SVG Backgrounds

One of the limitation of on-chain art, is file size. Everything looks pixelated. its an aesthetic, but also a challenge. Just made a bunch of files that will bring high resolution graphics to on-chain art. Will show more samples in the coming days.

Its a Spectrum

One of the things I like to explore is Free Will, and just how much of it we have. I have heard and read convincing arguments that we have none. That everything we do is a deterministic biochemical reaction. And the reflection that my robots do when creating this is similar. Many of the algorithms are deterministic, but some are not, and that is where things are interesting. The following are three images where I am trying to explore the concept visually from the first which is mostly in the realm of our souls, to the third, which attempts to have a purely digital look. We are probably somewhere between being run purely by our emotions and deterministic decisions, somewhere on this spectrum.

Feedback vs Reflection

Have called project Feedback for Last Year, but based on conversations with Ezra Shibboleth and Anirveda, now think a better name might be “REFLECTION”

Yikes - might be hard to make that into a visual you can read both ways like feedback…

Needed distraction so mocked something up real quick - kinda fun - maybe reflection is the name of the project, and feedback is the name of the robot?

Or maybe call it réflexion?

Developing an Aesthetic

2023 was spent experimenting and developing an aesthetic. 2024 will be spent executing on it and more importantly bringing the concepts of AI and the Blockchain a step forward. Months were spent experimenting and creating these images, but the code is incomplete and I am currently concentrating and codifying the creative process that produced these paintings.

The Monograph

One thing that I have been working on with a team of people for almost a year is a monograph. Monographs are books about an artist and their style, often self published for distribution to galleries and curators. Today for the first time I saw the finished book, and am humbled by its content. The people that have put this together with me are amazing, and I can wait to release it next month. Stay tuned for details, but until then a sneak peak…

Dualities

Feedback examines dualities.

Its paintings are a fight between Creativity and Logic.
It paints Expressively, while drawing Precisely.
Are its images coming from Emotion, or are they purely Deterministic.

And another duality it will be exploring is the Physical versus the Digital.

Our work together will exists on both painted canvases, and in purely digital 100% on-chain form.

You have seen the physical, the 100% on-chain version will be just as high quality - regardless of the cost.

A sneak peak of a detail:

Layer by Layer

One approach to painting is to paint in layers, working the entirety of a canvas one layer at a time, increasing the detail and finish with each layer.

This is how I collaborate with Feedback.

Have taught it to paint with a creative process like my own. It works one layer at a time, and between each layer it looks at the canvas and ask itself what the next layer needs.

If its feeling expressive, it paints a brush. When it needs to be technical, it draws with a pen.

Pindar

Feedback

There are two branches of my art.

The critically acclaimed AI Faces, and the commercially successful bitGANs.

This is not unusual. Throughout Art History (my favorite example being Turner) artists sometimes follow two paths simultaneously. One that keeps their studio open by appealing to the average patron, and another that challenges their viewers. Both are important to the artists, but the second branch needs the support of the first to exist.

This has been my experience with bitGANs and AI Faces. The unexpected commercial success of the bitGANs has allowed me to expand and go deep with my exploration of AI Faces. I now have multiple robot arms with multiple paint heads in a dedicated studio as I set out to launch the Feedback Series in 2024.

I minted the first Feedback painting today, January 1, 2024. See it here on SuperRare. It is hard to describe other than it is the culmination of everything I have ever worked on. It is even a merging of the two branches I just described.

The bitGANs and AI Faces are coming together.

How exactly?

Be sure to follow along here and on all my new social media accounts as I spend 2024 decentralizing from Twitter.

Discord: discord.gg/72JSspz2hR
Warpcast: warpcast.com/vanarman
Twitter: twitter.com/VanArman
Instagram: instagram.com/vanarman_
Threads: threads.net/@vanarman_

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