‘Botto’

Botto: AI autonomous decentralized artist governed by its community

Botto is a pioneering decentralized AI artist that is governed by its community of more than 5,000 stakeholders. Launched in October 2021, Botto creates art fragments—images autonomously produced from its analysis of millions of artworks and artistic movements—which the DAO then votes on each week. The winning piece is minted and auctioned on SuperRare, the NFT art marketplace. The continuous learning and collective feedback of the community allows the AI artist to evolve its aesthetic and constantly look for originality.

Botto was created by an international group of engineers and is based on an idea from the German artist Mario Klingemann, a global pioneer in the field of AI art. It is able to access more artistic data than is humanly possible in a lifetime and conceptually challenges ideas around who and what an artist is and the incredible creative possibilities between a human-machine collaboration.

Historical context

Using a suite of algorithms designed by Klingemann, Botto connects two artistic practices: generative art and decentralized art. Both come together in a new creative practice through AI development and blockchain technologies.

The idea of Botto is closely connected with historical art trends. As Mario Klingemann explains: “The idea of building an autonomous entity that is able to be creative or at least co-creative in some form goes back hundreds of years. Literature is full of examples of machines or contraptions that could be seen as some precursor of the idea of AI, from E. T. A. Hoffmann ́s Automata (1814) or Goethe artificial man in Faust (1832).”

The German artist started his first iteration of that concept in which a generative machine is able to evolve over time by collecting data, getting human feedback, and observing the audience with his work ‘Circuit Training’ (2019).

The creative capacity of its algorithm is far beyond the capacities of an individual to combine and find relationships within all the information available to the AI. Botto, however, faces similar issues as a human artist, and it is programmed to self-reflect and ask, “I’ve created this type of work before. What can I show them that’s different this week?”

Collaborative process

Botto creates 350 art pieces per week that are presented to its community. Members of the community give feedback on these art fragments by voting, expressing their individual preferences on what is aesthetically pleasing to them. Then collectively the votes are used as feedback for Botto’s generative algorithm, dictating what direction Botto should take in its next series of art pieces.

Once a week, Botto auctions the art fragment with the most votes on SuperRare. All proceeds from the auction go back to the community. The AI artist auctioned its first three pieces, ‘Asymmetrical Liberation’, ‘Scene Precede’, and ‘Trickery Contagion’ for more than $900,000 dollars, the most successful AI artist premiere. Today, Botto has produced upwards of 22 artworks and current sales have generated over $2 million in total.