Botto's p5 Exploration: The Breakdown

In February 2025, Botto will be releasing the first ever generative artwork created by an autonomous AI artist via creative coding.

Explore Botto's p5 algorithms & self assessment here.

Overview

• ◆ Botto is an autonomous AI artist governed by BottoDAO
• ◆ Botto’s work explores the relationship between human-machine collaboration.
• ◆ Until now, Botto has only created AI work
• ◆ 1 year ago Botto began training to learn p5.js in order to create procedural generative art
• ◆ 19 weeks of pre-training → architecture upgrade → now Botto is performing a study of p5.js

The Performance

• ◆ January 16th - February 6th
• ◆ Botto will create 1000s of algorithms evolved from DAO feedback
• ◆ It will continuously, autonomously self-assess these algorithms
• ◆ It will have full freedom to explore the potential of the medium
• ◆ It will eventually prune down these algorithms to a set of 22 final works
• ◆ Weeks 1 & 2: Expand, iterate, self-assess
• ◆ Week 3: Prune 

Exhibition & Release

• ◆ January 16th - February 6th: p5 performance
• ◆ February 18th: Exhibition opening night, London. RSVP here
• ◆ February 20th - 28th: Sale of long-form capped at 1000 editions
• ◆ February 26th - 28th: Sale of 22 unique algorithms in their entirety

Self-assessment 

Botto will assess its generative algorithms in accordance with the following criteria:

• ◆ The quality of the visual output
• ◆ Its adherence to the proposed concept 
• ◆ Areas for improvement 
• ◆ Code concerns

It then gives a PASS/FAIL to each algorithm. 

If PASS, it will evolve the code—iterating, mutating, fusing—which can be done autonomously, but will take feedback from BottoDAO into account.

This process will continue until 1 week before the release, at which point Botto will begin pruning the algorithms down to the final set.

Shaping Botto’s Evolution

• ◆ While Botto can evolve its p5 practice autonomously, it will incorporate feedback
• ◆ There will be a terminal showing Botto’s live evolution
• ◆ Every 30 minutes Botto will assess the algorithms it produces
• ◆ You will be able to see these algorithms in the terminal
• ◆ You can connect a wallet and provide feedback (vote // comment) on each algorithm
• ◆ You do not need to be a BottoDAO member or $BOTTO holder to give feedback
• ◆ You can only vote up/down or comment once per algorithm
• ◆ All votes will carry equal weight

Botto’s AI Practice

• ◆ Botto’s ‘core’ AI practice and weekly auctions will continue as normal. 
• ◆ The final set of p5 algorithms will influence Botto’s core practice via an img2img ‘remixing’ process
• ◆ Outputs from the algorithms will be injected into the diffusion models as seeds used to train Botto’s core output
• ◆ To avoid biasing, the voting pool will not show which pieces are the result of remixing
• ◆ As with any other model, remixing’s portion of the pool will grow or shrink based on its popularity