An innovative, award-winning artist pioneering the emerging field of AI-assisted robotic painting, Pindar Van Arman has blazed a unique trail in both physical and digital art worlds. His artonomous robot system uses deep learning neural networks, artificial intelligence, feedback loops and computational creativity to make independent aesthetic decisions trained on over a decade of inputs from Van Arman’s own artistic process.

Van Arman’s works are the focus of frequent solo shows, and have been covered in publications around the world from Fine Art America to Artnet News, MIT Technology Review, Smithsonian Magazine, The Washington Post, Scientific American, and more.

Throughout this journey Van Arman has focussed on portraiture, examining what it means to be human and interact with his subjects as he develops, literally, new ways of looking and seeing.

In Quantum Skull, Sotheby’s is thrilled to offer Van Arman’s first work using quantum computers, and to the best of our knowledge the first piece of this type that has ever been created. The piece has two parts: a physical painting and a time-based NFT. For each, Van Arman worked with fellow artist Russell Huffman to procedurally generate an image set from measurements made on an actual quantum computer. The images themselves reference Van Arman’s childhood memories of endless hours playing video games as well as references to his award winning AI Imagined Faces series, bitGANs, and CryptoPunks. Tapping into the properties of quantum noise (unchecked randomness) and quantum superposition (where objects are in more than one position at same time until a final observation takes place), these images were combined in fascinating ways and fed into the AI of his robotic system.

The NFT is a video of the AI-driven painting process (combined with some of the training data described above) and offers a rising and fading, deeply saturated, ever-shifting series of pixelated skull images. It is as if our observation is failing to pin down the skulls’ superimposed locations and the imagery is in constant flux–a ghost in the machine.