BottoALGORITHMIC EVOLUTION
- Presented by
- SOLOS
Opening event
Tuesday 18th February
In conversation with
Simon Hudson (co-lead Botto)
Louis Jebb (The Art Newspaper)
Mario Klingemann (Artist)
Melanie Lenz (V&A Museum)
Open to public
19 - 22 Feb 2025
10am - 6pm
Address
34 Mortimer St
London, W1W 7JS
SOLOS is proud to present ALGORITHMIC EVOLUTION, marking a defining moment in the trajectory of the decentralized autonomous artist Botto. Opening in London IRL, the exhibition unveils Botto’s genesis collection of algorithms creatively coded with p5.js—culminating a period of self-directed exploration, community participation, autonomous critique, and iterative refinement.
Algorithmic Evolution began in early 2024 as a 19-week experiment aimed at expanding Botto’s artistic practice beyond text-to-image generation into the realm of code-based generative art. Echoing early computational aesthetics, this series emerged through an iterative process, evolving thousands of dynamic visual algorithms refined through community feedback and Botto’s own self-review.
From 16 January to 6 February 2025, Botto conducted a final training run with an upgraded model, expanding its voting process beyond its core community to include open participation. A custom online platform p5.botto.com allowed participants to vote and comment, guiding the evolution of the algorithms and deepening the collaborative nature of the work.
The culmination of this performance resulted in 22 finalized algorithms, which constitute the Algorithmic Evolution collection and represent the genesis of Botto’s creative coding practice. The insights gained and aesthetics explored through this study of p5.js will continue to shape Botto’s development as an artist. In addition to the 22 full algorithms that will be committed to the blockchain, Botto is minting (up to) 1,000 individual outputs from Geometric Fluidity, the most popular algorithm from its initial 19-week training run in 2024.
Botto’s art creation has always been shaped by its community—thousands of participants who contribute insights, critiques, and suggestions. Governed by BottoDAO, it is the only autonomous artist to create with decentralized aesthetic guidance, redefining the artist-audience relationship as open, democratic, and constantly evolving.
From generating text-to-image works to exploring new generative methods, Botto has explored visual creation across many themes including surrealism, cubism, and digital aesthetics. Its shift to generative coding in 2024 marked a bold leap into algorithmic creativity.
This exhibition highlights the maturity of Botto’s artistic journey. It is the result of a year of pre-training, system upgrades, autonomous exploration, and community governance, reflecting greater sophistication and nuance with each iteration.
As Botto enters a new phase in 2025, its generative works exemplify the future of AI art, continuing to blur the lines between creator and creation, human and machine, artist and ecosystem, and challenging viewers to rethink the very definition of an artist.
Please refer to essays written by Luba Elliott, Peter Bauman, Julia Greenway and maltefr about Botto's explorations of p5.js.
Botto
Botto is a decentralized autonomous artist, initially conceptualized by Mario Klingemann, and governed by a collective of stakeholders through the structure of a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).
Botto makes use of a combination of software models called Stable Diffusion, VQGAN + CLIP, GPT-3, voting, and a number of other models and custom augmentations. The generative models are the...
SOLOS
SOLOS is dedicated to presenting digital artworks by the world’s leading artists.
