Creative AI art, Tomorrowland sells tomorrow’s future  – Cointelegraph Magazine

Greg Oakford, co-founder of NFT Fest Australia, is your guide to the world of NFTs from a collector and fan’s perspective.

Seventeen years ago, Pindar Van Arman built a robot that, like him, painted with a brush on canvas.

He has built several robots since, with each iteration possessing a more sophisticated artificial intelligence that tried to paint “more like I painted.”

The term OG can be thrown around often undeservedly, but Van Arman is truly that when it comes to AI art.

He created his first crypto art project in 2015 — titled bitPaintr — and minted his first Ethereum nonfungible token (NFT) in 2018 titled “AI Imagined Portrait Painted by a Robot” on SuperRare. 

“It was really hard in 2015 because I had the challenge of trying to explain the tech in an emotional way. It triggered a visceral reaction where people would say, ‘Well, wait, these are robots that can’t be emotional,’” says Van Arman. 

“I’d got hate mail back then when people would say it’s hard enough for artists to make a living. Now, we have to compete with robots. There were a lot of barriers back then.” 

Validity of AI art

For the cynics that question the validity of AI art, Van Arman agrees with them to a degree but makes a distinction between AI being labeled as an artist versus being creative. 

“The thing I agree with them on is that AI can’t make art. But AI is a tool that can be used to make art by an artist. When you put it in those terms, no one can really disagree with you. They may not like it, but it’s hard for them to disagree,” Van Arman says. 

“Here’s where it gets controversial though, here’s the middle ground that I claim which I know is true because I see it and I program it; AI cannot be an artist. AI can be creative. Creative in a very similar way that humans are creative.”

Van Arman is no stranger to having people’s eyes glaze over when explaining his work.

“All the questioning and doubt over the years told me I was on to the right thing because when you have artists in the art world saying that your stuff is too weird, you sort of know you’re on to something. I mean, artists are the most avant-garde, forward thinking group of people there are,” says Van Arman. 

“For artists and art curators not to get something that you know is true and for them to say something’s impossible, you just know the time hasn’t come yet and just keep on pursuing that.”

Freedom to transact

Van Arman has frequently spoke in favor of royalties, supporting the current writer’s strike in the United States.

“I’m always in the middle of the royalty debate because I 100% support them and I support them because they exist in the writing world, they exist absolutely in the recording world. Hollywood’s on strike right now because the writers stopped getting royalties on streaming services. This has significantly impacted their lives and now they’re being taken advantage of again. The whole Hollywood strike is about royalties on streaming services like Netflix and others,” Van Arman says.

Van Arman notes the difficult of keeping track of royalties, claiming that the Ethereum network has provided a better means to guarantee the “Freedom to Transact.”

“It’s a new philosophy that the asset has to be 100% sovereign. If you own something, you have total control over it, you should not be forced to pay royalties. I went hard early on against people that were saying royalties are like tips,” Van Arman says.

“I agree with freedom to transact and that means that artists have the right to say, there are royalties on my artwork and if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it. No one’s forcing you to buy it and it makes perfect sense to me. But for some reason I have a hard time explaining that to people. They say no, no, no, the asset is worthless unless it has no encumbrance. They might think it’s worthless, but it might be worth something to someone else.”

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Rapid-fire Q&A

When someone looks at your art, are there any particular emotions you hope that they’re experiencing?

“The goal for me of making AI art and the emotion I’m after is for people to not know it was AI art. To feel something and observe something and not know that the image was painted by a robot. And then only afterwards they realized it was painted by a robot, then that becomes part of the narrative. They can do a double take, they learn the story through that.” 

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