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The concept of autonomy—the ability of an entity to determine its own laws—has its origins in ancient Greece, where it was conceived as the principle of self-governance among city-states. In the early modern period, autonomy came to signify the capacity for the subject’s self-determination, which in turn was seen as the essence of individual freedom. Soon thereafter, art emancipated itself from the authority of religion and thereby claimed autonomous status. Today, the term occupies yet another conceptual frontier, as autonomy becomes the north star for machine intelligence. Artificial intelligence systems worthy of the name are the realization of the ghost in the machine.
Botto, conceived as a “decentralized autonomous artist,” has from its beginning explored the dream of machine self-determination. In this, it both continues the history of modern art and breaks with it. The history of 20th century art is rich with examples of artists limiting their subjectivity by handing their agency over to the machine, anticipating the intertwined fate of human and machine autonomy that we witness today.
Yet the last century’s nonhuman systems were fundamentally limited in their capacity for financial self-determination. Botto went beyond these earlier attempts by not only using generative systems for synthetic image creation but also distributing ownership through freely tradable tokens and selling its outputs within the ecosystem of a digital economy. Botto’s exhibition at Verse is the next step toward a greater, if by no means complete, financial autonomy.
With its adoption of p5, Botto shifts its focus away from visual indeterminacy, embracing the structured visual language of generative art. Botto’s earliest works clearly reflected the indeterminate style typical of early GAN aesthetics. Over time, however, its creations, which might be too diverse to possess unifying stylistic attributes, have grown sharper, driven by advancements in generative AI. During the same period, generative art has established itself as a foundational genre within the nascent history of crypto art. Botto’s use of p5 can be seen as a form of meta-commentary, wherein one genre of crypto art reflects on another. This transition also suggests a process of maturation, bringing more restraint to Botto’s previously wide-ranging visual outputs.
Ultimately, the performance at Verse will culminate in a long-form work of 1,000 outputs, along with a curated selection of 22 algorithms that will be available for sale. Any element of the exhibition, from an individual output to the standalone algorithm to the interactive performance through which the project is realized, could be seen as an artwork in itself.
Botto’s performance cuts to the essence of machine autonomy. Does autonomy arise through the system’s ability to evolve into new agents and collaborate with galleries? Must its output surpass human generative art to prove its independence? And who would judge this – humans or machines? Or does true autonomy require liberation from human aesthetic judgment, perhaps even rejecting the human concept of art entirely? Fragile in its foundation, the autonomy of this machine artist takes contours in these questions, prompted by the performance of the exhibition.
Written by maltefr
maltefr is Head of Artist Relations at Tribute Labs and a curator at glitch Gallery.
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...