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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.
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...