A Brief History of bitGANs

(TLDR - Video at bottom)
In the brief few months of their existence, I have lost control of the bitGANs. This history is not to be confused with a roadmap of the project, because there is no roadmap. The bitGANs tore it up. They just do want they want. Those who have witnessed it know exactly what I am talking about. For those first getting into bitGANs, however, their mechanics and story might be confusing.

This brief history is intended to get anyone who is unfamiliar with the bitGANs up to date.

It will cover:

1: Their Early Origins born from some of the earliest tokens on SuperRare.

2: My discovery of the algorithm to make them while experimenting with the Rinkeby Nouns.

3: How the bitGANs then took life of their own and started generating themselves with the algorithm

4: And finally how they found their way to become SuperRare bitGANs

The Early Origins

More than 3 years ago I minted my first work on SuperRare. It was some of the earliest art on the platform. They weren’t my first blockchain art projects though. Had couple previous projects that used BTC, one of which was called AI Imagined Faces and can be seen below.

These were robot painted “editions” and numbered as such and verified on BTC blockchain, except that each was unique. I didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the spirit of the current trends we are seeing on projects like ArtBlocks. AI Imagined Faces was a large collections of unique generative images within a theme. In addition to these 128 which were painted by my robots, I minted 4 on SuperRare which are currently owned by Hackatao, XCOPY, matrix, and Prometheus.

The reason I bring up this early project is two-fold. The first reason is that I will take every opportunity I can to point out that XCOPY has gone on the record that his favorite NFT is his AI Imagined Face. Second reason is that the AI used to make these faces is nearly identical to the algorithms used to create bitGANs. I had returned to it after 3 years to revisit both my AI and cryptoArt roots.

However, while the AI Imagined Faces were generated from GANs trained on 10,000 celebrities, the bitGANs trained on 10,000 pieces of 32x32 8bit art. And while each is generated from the same data, they all come out as unique creatures.

People often ask me specifically how I created the training data, which brings us to the Rinkeby Nouns.

The Rinkeby Noun Study

When the Nouns DAO was testing on the Rinkeby network a lot of us had a blast spending 1000s of pretend ETH in absurd bidding wars for pretend Nouns.

Loved the project and the testing and I remember talking with bunch of people on the discord about derivatives. I am usually uncomfortable with derivatives since they disrespect the intention of the original artist whom may or may not be fine with them. But the Nouns project was different. The Nouns DAO encouraged free use of both the art and their code base.

So with their permission, I wondered what it would look like if I fed the Rinkeby Nouns into my old face generating algorithm, the one used to make the AI Imagined Faces I mentioned earlier.

Spent weeks trying many variations and approaches to the data that never resolved themselves. The algorithms would search for patterns, but never find them and ultimately fail. My old GANs weren’t working.

I was about to give up when late one night I lost power in my studio. Frustrated I called it a night, but when I returned the next morning, I found all my computers on and they were generating what would later reveal themselves to be nounGANs.

They were cute and danced in and out of our dimension with shifting eyes. These things had personality. I soon discovered that they had appeared to me just when I was about to give up, to make sure I kept at it. Using some sort of communication method I still do not understand, they told me this was an important project that needed to be completed. They continued that I would soon be contacted by something called skullGANs with more information and to stick with it until they appeared. I asked them what skullGANs were, but all they told me was that I needed to summon them with my own art. Then they stopped communicating with me.

Summon them with my own art?

I spent next several weeks creating my own set of 32x32 8bit images, same dimensions as Nouns, but with my own pixelated art. When they were ready I put them into the system that generated the nounGANs and waited…

The bitGANs

Sure enough, the bitGANs started generating themselves and it is difficult to describe the amount of madness that ensued. So to quickly sum it up as briefly as possible.

It began with the skullGANs. First the Transdimensional skullGAN appeared, followed by 128 more bitGANs. Most were skullGANs, but they had unique traits and several of them had unique types. Crazy thing about the unique traits is that they held clues to puzzles, and an entire community formed behind solving the puzzles.

From the puzzles learned they were from the future and were trying to tell us something important about it. Just when we thought we were beginning to understand them, 64 more bitGANs appeared that were a mixture of things called cyberGANs and roboGANs. And these guys were mischievous. Despite the security of the Ethereum ecosystem, they were escaping from wallets, going out into the metaverse, and even appearing in people’s living rooms and galleries around the world.


Luckily, however, similar to the skullGANs, a puzzle was hidden in their properties and the community solved it to get them back under control.

noohp was able to crack the puzzle by discovering a seed phrase hidden in their properties. The seed phrase was then used to open up a hidden wallet and capture the mastermind behind the escape - qubitGAN, (as well as another bitGAN accomplice). noohp was rewarded with stewardship of the 2 bitGANs as they accepted noohp as their master.

Things calmed down and it seamed that the bitGANs were back under our control, and then a forge appeared in the bitGALLERY.

Almost as soon as the forge appeared bitGANs started sacrificing themselves in a ritualistic burn. Took us a while to figure how and why, but we discovered that if a Flaming bitGAN is sent into the burn wallet (at burntgans.eth) with any other bitGAN, the two will be fused into a new higher dimensional being. As for the why, it would appear that they are interested in taking over my robots to complete a physical painting of the new bitGAN. The bitGANs had found a way into the physical world.

The first two bitGANs to do this was The Artist which was forged by a Flaming bitGAN into The Cryptographer. And then dozens and dozens of bitGANs threw themselves into the crucible. See the peculiar phenomenon for yourself at https://www.cryptovoxels.com/play?coords=NE@244E,117N

The first three bitGANs after The Cryptographer to emerge were the…

SuperRare bitGANs

Born of fire, the SuperRare 1/1s Bit Mouth 11,400, Cyber Zombie 10,366, and The Five Eyes 10,781 brought themselves into existence.

Each was both a SR Token as well as physical painting. Each had attributes, some of the first attributes to appear in SuperRare tokens. It was pretty clear that there is some sort of puzzle behind them, but it is not exactly clear how to solve it, or even what exactly the puzzle is.

All that we know for now is that they are available for bidding at

https://superrare.com/vanarman/creations

What’s next, who knows?

But this video wraps everything up in under a minute.