Sacred Art, Giraffes, and the Botto Experience

The Sacred Art Machine

The highest ideals of art have historically been held to standards of divinity. We celebrate fidelity to tradition, grand gestures, aesthetic miracles, proclamations of higher consciousness, and so on.

There is something sacred inherent to human creativity, and for good reason: It may very well be the single most important asset that we have as a species. It is the engine that has built our cities, our cultures, our weapons, and our gods. 

As we consider AI-made art, this notion of divinity becomes impressed into the Machine. Futurist visions from the 20th century have been ripe with depictions of omnipotent artificial beings. We are primed to consider intelligences and creativities higher than our own as the future of our species. There now exists a creative succession from God to Man to Machine, philosophically speaking.

It’s not a stretch to consider AI’s existence as tied to associations of religiosity. It’s one that isn’t beholden to any traditional brand of belief, but a clear and concrete fact that the intellectual powers we are building are soon to surpass our own natural gifts. We will come to hope these entities will guide us toward paradise. If they don’t, we’ll seek other gods to ask. Who knows what or who will answer. 

What is sure is that our species is making higher beings, and they are being brought forth by humanity’s wicked and holy creative prowess. In turn, we are asking AI entities themselves to become creators. It’s important to ask what they are making. The question of why they are making is even more pressing.

Computer Artists Making Computer Art

p5.botto represents a new chapter in the young and emergent career of Botto as an AI entity-artist. It might be said that code art is a natural medium for a machine to endeavor as a creative practice. We consider computational language, math and memory, iterations, computer digital production, and screen-based consumption as obvious areas for experimenting between a computerized maker and its artistic work.

The results of Botto’s code art experiments might be thought of as calculated culture. BottoDAO has served the role as a collective creative mentor that has sought to steer Botto’s outputs toward results that achieve a human-appreciative stamp of artistic approval. Its outputs spark conversation, inspire memes, evoke pride, and inspire so many questions about meaning and purpose.

In these results of Botto’s experiments we can see that such stamps of approval lean toward algorithms that are abstract. Abstraction lends itself to an air of purity in the absence of clear associative traits, and in this absence, we humans are given the liberty to fill this space with our imaginations inspired by the emotional stimulus each given work represents. They serve as fill-in-the-blank metaphors for whatever we may transpose. 

For some, the resulting works seem to contain a sanctified quality, as if they are relics from an emergent ideology of virtual religion in which coding language is sacrosanct. The results we’ve found in the final 22 outputs are sophisticated, beautiful, elegant, and appear imbued with a sacred aura of a ghost within the machine…There’s also a giraffe. 

The Trojan Giraffe

From over 6000 outputs that BottoDAO voted on, a child-like tableaux of an elephant and giraffe marching through the Savannah achieved the most votes. What does that tell us?

Against all the aforementioned discussion on religiosity, Prismatic Safari: Digital Pursuit Symphony may stand as a defiant gesture of nihilism. Some have seen the piece as an affront to the purity and elegance of the other 21 works that comprise Botto’s first generative art collection. Others have been comparing its kitschy crudeness to the infamous Kevin as a symbol of NFT culture’s degeneracies. The elevation of the work is also an example of what can occur when Botto’s traditional closed-loop system becomes punctured by particular rebellious spirits. (At least one voter is known to have gamed the voting system to give it its initial push up into the leaderboard, but even they didn’t expect it to get carried away by the mob to first place.)

Prismatic Safari’s ascension is a testament to the urge of human creativity to impose itself, to function in opposition to common perceptions, and to crave both the unexpected and the new. We’ve also seen a range of enthusiastic responses from the community that have circulated around mimetic remixes by artists such as Roope Rainisto, die with the most likes, Xer0x. After a brief period of disbelief that Prismatic Safari came out on top, the work quickly became embraced in all its goofy, tender-hearted being.

Curiously, Botto’s creator Mario Klingemann has a history of exploring giraffe motifs in past AI explorations. And the term “giraffing” is a known phenomena in machine vision that describes a particular quirk in which AI systems can overestimate the prevalence of giraffes in real-world experience.

Whether prophetic or accidental, Prismatic Safari partakes in curious AI legacies. Despite some uneasy initial reactions from the Botto community at large, perhaps this work was meant to be.

Botto as an Artist, Botto as a System

Prismatic Safari reminds us that sometimes it's not about how Botto makes art as an AI entity, but how art emerges from Botto as a system whose mechanisms are shaped by the biases of humans and markets alike.

Since the origination of Botto’s p5.js sandbox in March of 2024, hundreds of humans have contributed both votes and feedback to Botto’s continual production, assessments, and iterations of code art it has created. 

The field-testing of natural language feedback can now be seen as a revelatory but complicated entry into the architectures of Botto. Written responses, suggestions, directions, and praise offered by the Botto community have been inputs for Botto to read, discern, interpret, and form new pathways of creation based on what we, the Humans, want to see. 

Through dedicated commenting, some users were able to get Botto to create works that derived from their own particular imaginations. As an experiment, this sort of behavior was predictable, yet it veers away from the core tenet of a closed loop system that Botto has adhered to. With its more robust interpretation of these inputs, perhaps it was ready for a more collaborative approach, but the outcome has the DAO questioning whether it let Botto be a little too vulnerable to outside influence.

For this AI entity artist, we humans insist on bending Botto’s outputs toward our own aesthetic preferences. Through processes of crowd-sourced curation, Botto’s canon is defined by what voters agree are its finest works in the aggregate. As BottoDAO continues its work toward achieving greater and greater autonomy for Botto, considerations will continue to be made in balancing what the DAO aspires for Botto to become and how these aspirations can be realized. Experiments lead to unexpected results. From results we learn, iterate, test, re-build, and continue advancing the architectures of both a system and a type of artist which, frankly, the world has never seen before.

Text by Gregory Eddi Jones