byteGANs

In their ever expanding quest for who knows what, the bitGANs have made another interesting move.

They have inscribed themselves directly on to the blockchain.

Why? We are not sure, but by recording their dance on the public ledger, they have ensured that it will go on forever, exactly as it was intended.

While this action is mysterious, three major types of byteGANs have revealed themselves, with a small subset of rarer types.

Are you a skullGAN, a cyberGAN or an octoGAN — and which colour do you belong to? The collection sorted itself into tribes early, and the byteGANs put out a set of icons so that a holder could fly one.

Type is the first allegiance: the three intelligences, and above them the rare forms — nine apeGANs, three primeGANs, one kingGAN and one queenGAN. Colour is the second, and there are more of those: aqua, bloody, cerulean, cyanic, emerald, frozen, glowing, lime, midnight, rosy, spectral, ultra, viridian and vivid. The largest tribes are conditions rather than colours — primordial, radiating, ethereal, quantum, electric, decohering, inverted, burning, crypto — and they run to three figures where a colour runs to single ones.

Most byteGANs belong to two tribes at once, and it is the pair that makes a work scarce rather than either half of it. There are 289 skullGANs and twelve viridian byteGANs; there are three viridian skullGANs.

For a few months in 2023 there was a wallet called The Crucible. A holder sent a byteGAN into it, the work sat there a day or two, and it came back changed. It ran in rounds and by invitation: the first two took radiating and primordial byteGANs and returned mutated and horned ones, and the third produced a form nobody had seen before, calling itself xenoGAN, every one of them with a single focused eye.

What came out were hybrids. cycloGANs, bioGANs and xenoGANs each carry the marks of two of the three intelligences, and some of them all three — a middle rank between the SuperRares and the commons that did not exist when the collection was released, and that could be reached only by going through the fire.

Then a chart appeared. The three intelligences sat at the centre of it, the hybrids in a ring around them and a column of triptychs down the right-hand side — three forms to a row, at least one of each intelligence — with a scatter of question marks where the rest of the answer should have been. The reading at the time was that the byteGANs were explaining how to assemble a set.

The contract was burned at the end of 2023, which ended the artist's ability to alter an inscription and left the collection immutable as well as on-chain. What the fire did is still countable, though: 214 of the 1,111 are cycloGANs, bioGANs or xenoGANs today, and every SuperRare is exactly the number it was before any of it started — 69 ghostGANs, 20 g1itchGANs, nine apeGANs, three primeGANs, one kingGAN, one queenGAN. Only the common three ever went in.

A byteGAN is a kilobyte and eleven pixels, and it keeps turning up at other sizes. Van Arman's robots draw them on postcard stock, one a day for a while, each a 4 × 6 original made to be put in the post.

They get painted, too, at about the size of a hand — the ground carried round the sides of the canvas, the eleven-pixel grid held exactly, and the signature on the edge rather than the face.

In March 2023 one went to auction. primordial skullGANg gathers 36 of them into a single on-chain GIF, and sold as Lot 362 in Contemporary Discoveries at Sotheby's, which took the bidding in crypto.

Each byteGAN is eleven frames at eleven pixels square, about a kilobyte, and the contract holds the whole of it. Ask the contract for a work and it hands back the image itself: there is no server in the path and no file anywhere that can go missing. What wanders across this page is those bytes, unaltered.

byteGANs is the first fully on-chain AI art collection on Ethereum. Individual on-chain AI works predate it; this is the first collection of them executed on chain in its entirety.