Pindar Van Arman

Pindar Van Arman is an American artist and roboticist who builds painting robots to study how creativity works. He graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University and took a master's degree at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., in 2010. He built his first painting system in 2005. Later machines included bitPaintr, a 2015 robot that painted portraits from photos people uploaded, and CloudPainter, which took first place at Robot Art 2018. The robots work in a loop of painting, checking the canvas with AI and painting again, and one picture can keep them busy for days.

In 2017 he trained a neural network to recognize faces and gave his robot two rules: imagine a face and paint it, then stop as soon as it sees one. The result was Emerging Faces, 44 canvases that Christie's counts among the first paintings made autonomously by neural networks and robots. One Emerging Faces portrait, minted in 2018 as AI Imagined Portrait Painted by a Robot #2, entered LACMA's collection in 2023 with Cozomo de' Medici's gift, and Christie's offered nine canvases in its Augmented Intelligence sale in 2025.

He carried the idea on in The First Sparks of Artificial Creativity in 2018, AI Imagined Faces On-Chain in 2022 and Reflection in 2024. Alongside them he released pixel creatures made by GANs trained on his own 8-bit art: the bitGANs, then the podGANs and the byteGANs, which he compressed enough to store entirely on Ethereum. Sotheby's has sold his painting and token Quantum Skull and two byteGANg works. His latest system, also called cloudpainter, travels in an electric truck and paints on steel and copper from what its sensors record along the way.