Pindar Van Arman is an American artist and roboticist based in Washington, D.C. For more than fifteen years he has built painting robots as a way of separating the algorithmic parts of his own creativity from the human ones. His systems include bitPaintr and CloudPainter. CloudPainter took first place in the 2018 Robot Art competition for portraits painted with a brush on canvas. The robots work in a feedback loop: they make marks, analyze them with AI, and paint again. In the bitGANs story, the creatures eventually 'take over' the robots and paint themselves one brushstroke at a time.