The robots and I created less than 50 of these paintings of varying sizes on various canvases. While many videos exist of the creations, I never thought to make a detailed catalogue because at the time, I couldn’t give them away. It was just something I thought was really interesting. I made them to see what would happen.

In the years that followed, however, their popularity grew and they achieved both critical and commercial success. The collection were awarded First Place in Robot Art 2018, an international competition with a $100,000 purse. There have also been in multiple shows around the world, and had multiple six figure sales of both the canvases and NFTs. One of the Emerging Faces was accepted into LACMA’s permanent collection. And perhaps most significant, though I didn’t realize it at the time, many believe these to be the first canvases painted by neural networks.

As they grew in importance, I realized I needed to do my best to catalogue them and track them all down, and the following is the best account I have been able to come up with.

One of the challenges of cataloguing this collection is that at the time of their creation, I didn’t know that they would become important works. I created the paintings as an AI art experiment, and only had time on the weekends and over vacations. I specifically remember making a bulk of the work during a brief vacation I took between Christmas and New Years of 2017. And though they all shared a theme and algorithm, they were on different sized canvases. One was on a 30”x40” canvas, two were on 16”x20”s, a handful were on 9”x12”s, and the majority of them were on 11”x14”s.

So working from a mix of memories, notes, and digital forensics, the following is my best account of where all these pieces currently are.

The single 30”x40” was sent to an artist I was collaborating with in Bristol, England, except we never completed the collab, so I don’t know what actually became of the canvas. Fortunately it survives in digital form as the first NFT I ever minted as my SuperRare genesis piece and is in the MOMUS collection.

The 9”x12” canvases are unfortunately lost. All of them. Only made a handful of which I have videos, but I do not know where they are and I have searched everywhere. Fortunately though, three of them were minted on SuperRare in 2018 and are in X-COPY, Hackatao, and Matrix’s private collections.

We also painted 2 16”x20” canvases, one of which was also made into the second NFT I minted and is the piece that was accepted into LACMA’s permanent collection. I still have both of these canvases and am considering whether I mint the second. Perhaps if another major museum requests it for their collection.

This brings me to the largest group of canvases which were the 11”x14” Emerging Faces. For these I have the best records even though I only know that there were 33-40 of them. And I say 33-40 because I have different data points that tell me different numbers. Also the data I have was scraped out of archives where I did digital forensics on various data sources including videos, database tables, and files with descriptive filenames. Problem is that the digital forensics did not match each other so my understanding of exactly how many were painted is fuzzy.

The best piece of evidence for their number and sequence is the following video. It shows the paint in the background around the canvas get thicker with paint splatter as the time lapse progresses. So at least I know that its in the right order for the 11”x14” canvases. This is useful information, but I don’t recall where the 11”x14” were in relation to the other sizes, so it is unclear. Also the order, despite the photographic evidence, does not match my other data sources, so it tells me my data is unreliable.

As for the whereabouts of these 33-40 Emerging Faces. 16 canvases are in private collections as a polyptych, triptych, and 4 stand alone pieces. There is also a stand alone 2020 NFT on SuperRare that was sold alongside the triptych at auction. And I have lost track of 5-12 canvases, and if you are reading this and have one definitely reach out so I can see if you are one of the collectors I am aware of.

So that brings me to the final 12 that know the whereabouts of. 11 remain in my studio and 1 has been sent to Sotheby’s to auction alongside a brand new fully on-chain NFT.

This particular canvas, pictured on the easel in my studio, is one of the earlier Emerging Faces painted. In the time-lapse video that shows 33 get painted, it appears second. This does not mean it was second, however, as I do not know if the video shows the first canvases to be painted. But for those that like data, there is one cool thing I know about it from my recent digital forensics, and that is that it was painted with exactly 644 Strokes.

So knowing all this the following is a grid documenting to the best of my knowledge all the existing Emerging Faces in physical and digital form.