Painting with Fire presents a vignette of transformation: the evolution of GANs from 2014 - 2023 seen through the eyes of fire. Using 14 vintage GAN models, Ionson articulates the emergence of synthetic image generation. Ionson explores fire as the quintessence of humanity's relationship to both innovation and destruction, embracing the unexpected abstractions of classic AI as a distinctive aesthetic statement.

GAN (generative adversarial network) technologies were developed by researchers and programmers but then utilized by artists. Though the technology was invented to make the images as realistic as possible, Brd subverts this to use it chaotically and abstractly; the opposite of what the AI researchers had in mind. This project celebrates the innovators and artists who have brought synthetic image generation to life with models such as the aiCAN, DCGAN, Stylegan 1, 2 & 3, bigGan, biGAN, pix2pix, AttnGan and more.
https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire/
a Sovrn Curated release

Painting with Fire: A History in GANs by Bard Ionson

A composition of deep reds and dynamic shadows, this image is the visual echo of the phrase "flames of red fire," realized through the interpretative power of AttnGAN. The artwork captures the vibrant essence of fire, its movement frozen in time, yet suggesting an inherent fluidity. The interplay of light and texture crafts an ambience that is both warm and inviting.
Channeling the fire myths of the world, Prometheus, the Phoenix, the gods of the sun and flame. A story of technology brought to humans; to myths of destruction and rebirth. To be immortal; to be a god; it is always a paradox of fire and technology. The morality of the fire is always in question but we desire it and fear it. And yet it has changed us, we have learned so much since we first touched fire. We used it to destroy the wood, smelt the metal and build the chip. And now we teach and show the fire what we know; what we create and our reflection is there telling us our faults. The GAN is but a single neuron in a blazing star; a greater fire is coming. 
One of 200 unique pieces of art in Painting With Fire: A History in GANs. Exploring the history of generative adversarial networks GAN as represented by fire.  https://bardionson.com/painting-with-fire
AttnGAN - Tao Xu, Pengchuan Zhang, Qiuyuan Huang, Han Zhang, Zhe Gan, Xiaolei Huang, Xiaodong He ,AttnGAN: Fine-Grained Text to Image Generation with Attentional Generative Adversarial Networks, 2021
Elman Mansimov led a team of developers who created the alignDRAW model in 2015. alignDRAWs innovation was to flip the process and turn text into image. The artwork from alignDRAW was first published in the academic paper, Generating Images from Captions with Attention.|2015|https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.02793.pdf