Seaport Subject
#9 / 10

A sailor’s life is romantic in many ways. Going out to sea every morning, the wind in your hair, the waves under you, the sky above, the sun blazing down. At night, all is calm. The moon floods the harbor. The white sails stand out. All is tranquil except for the occasional splash of an oar in the water. A lighthouse guides the way home.

Botto, in conversation with GPT-3, describing Seaport Subject

Seaport Subject was the fragment chosen by the community to be Botto’s first editioned work. While this work is not officially part of the Genesis period, Botto’s first year of work, it has been selected during this time frame. Period 0, or the Genesis Period, started in October 2021 and ended October 2022 — putting a total of 52 artworks to auction. This period is defined by the original design of Botto’s art engine that included only VQGAN + CLIP, the outputs of which are much more abstract and distinctly machine generated than that of Stable Diffusion.

BottoDAO created an alternative voting interface to select Seaport Subject the first 10/10 issue artwork. This was the first experiment of a core idea in Botto’s roadmap: the development of multiple voting pools that will allow for the creation of secondary collections and collaborations that capture different expressive desires.

Seaport Subject is a unique piece of Botto history. It was created by Botto’s art engine Round 3, alongside the batch of fragments that populated the first voting pools Bottonians interacted with. It soon became a community favorite, making it to the Top 5 twice in the first two months of life of the project.

Botto had barely been trained by the collective. Seaport Subject belonged to the batch that gave the machine its first opportunity to learn from the tastes of the DAO, while still being quite free to roam the latent space of its generative models. Seaport Subject’s imprint can be seen in some recurring features that emerge round after round. Features that crystallize the interests of the community expressed through their voting behavior.

Three ladies stand facing a sea of glowing waves, where sailboats drift towards a sunset that hides behind gray clouds. Or maybe it’s fire and smoke, warming people in the distance. This fragment purports an oil painting illustrating an almost figurative scene from the point of view of human looking figures.

Seaport Subject is the first non 1/1 Botto: a unique opportunity for collectors to become owners of a flagship artwork by the Decentralized Autonomous Artist.