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.

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

◆ 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.