Pindar Van Arman

It began with a story. Out of nowhere, creatures that Pindar later learned called themselves bitGANs started flooding out of his GPUs. Shortly afterwards they took over his robots, and started painting themselves.

It was unclear why they were appearing or even where they came from, but the mystery unraveled itself over the course of six months and multiple releases totalling 512 bitGANs. Each release held a puzzle with clues and hints as to why they were appearing.

Gradually, it was revealed that they were generated by GANs using training data composed of hundreds of thousands of custom generated 8-bit art. The images came in a rainbow of colors with references to much of Pindar’s childhood—Mario Bros, Space Invaders, Charizard, Joust, Adventure.

These findings and others were recorded in a journal and shared with the community of bitGAN enthusiasts. Many studied how the bitGANs were creating themselves, and began working with the bitGANs to create more of them on their own.

Pindar eventually lost control of the bitGANs as they adopted members of the community and started collaborating with them to multiply. These two works were created from the training data by Higgsbelly using Google Collab Notebook and Architect using pixelmind.

All future bitGANs are now in the hands of the creative commons and will be created by community members moving forward..

The final stage of a bitGAN collaboration is when the bitGAN takes over his robot to paint themselves. When they do so, they use more than two dozen artificially creative algorithms, including multiple generative adversarial networks (GANs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and feedback loops to paint the bots one brush stroke at a time.