Botto is a highly speculative project and an artistic experiment that responds to our time, pushing us to debate the very foundations of art. Its entity, creative process, and works confront us with key questions about the value of art and the role of the artist.
Botto is a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) “algorithmic artist” capable of generating hundreds of creative proposals or fragments per week, grappling with its own originality as an artist and submitting its work for public selection.
Created through artificial intelligence and governed by a decentralized community, Botto operates as a DAO artist, producing hundreds of creative proposals or fragments each week. These are evaluated by its users, who decide which fragment will be finalized as an artwork and signed by the artist before being auctioned. This voting process allows Botto to learn from its creations and shape its artistic trajectory.
Launched in October 2021, Botto originated from a whitepaper authored by German artist Mario Klingemann, an international pioneer in AI-based creation. The project was brought to life through Klingemann’s collaboration with a global team led by ElevenYellow and Carbono.
Sparking a conceptual debate about the nature of artistic authorship, the collaboration between humans and machines, group co-creation, and augmented creativity.
Through a set of algorithms, Botto bridges two artistic traditions: generative art and decentralized art. These merge into a new creative practice that employs artificial intelligence and blockchain technology to unleash prodigious generative power and imagination, while fostering a strong sense of community inherent to blockchain-based art.
The concept of Botto is closely tied to historical artistic movements. As Mario Klingemann explains: “The idea of constructing an autonomous entity capable of being creative, or at least co-creative, dates back hundreds of years. Literature is filled with examples of machines or contraptions that could be considered precursors to the idea of artificial intelligence, from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Automata (1814) to Goethe’s artificial man in Faust (1832).”
Botto follows suit to previous experiments on autonomous artists such AAron or the Painting full . Botto thus raises compelling debates in contemporary art history, focusing on two main ideas: the tension between collective and individual creation, and artificial intelligence as a new entity in the arts, capable of exploring uncharted creative territories. Through this lens, we can observe the stylistic evolution of Botto’s work and recognize that it offers a glimpse into the aesthetic interests of the community formed around it. The concept of community is fundamental to the project and is embedded in the foundation of NFTs. Collective responses feed the algorithm, which then generates new images. While stylistic and thematic decisions influence the production and its evolution, the creative agency ultimately lies with the algorithm, raising questions about the definition of the artist and the role of AI in artistic authorship.
Botto is also the first guest artist in Etopia’s virtual gallery, a newly created space designed to showcase works from the media façade in the metaverse. This marks Mario Klingemann’s second collaboration with Etopia. The exhibition spans three spaces within the center: the media façade, the virtual gallery, and the Etopia exhibition hall.
Concept : MARIO KLINGEMANN. Alemania / Germany, 1970
Mario Klingemann is a renowned new media artist whose work focuses on exploring complex systems through the use of algorithms and artificial intelligence. He has a particular interest in the human perception of art and creativity, investigating how machines can augment or emulate creative processes. His artistic career spans a wide range of fields, including generative art, cybernetic aesthetics, information theory, feedback loops, pattern recognition, emergent behaviors, neural networks, cultural data, storytelling, and blockchain technology.
Mario Klingemann was awarded the Lumen Prize Gold in 2018, received an honorary mention at the Prix Ars Electronica in 2020, and won the British Library Labs Creative Award in 2015. He has completed a resi- dency at the Google Arts & Culture Lab and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of AI art. His work has been featured in art publications, acade- mic research, and exhibited at international museums and art festivals such as Ars Electronica (Linz), Centre Pompidou (Paris), ZKM, Barbican (London), The Photographers’ Gallery (London), Colección Solo (Ma- drid), Nature Morte Gallery (New Delhi), Residenzschloss (Dresden), Gray Area Foundation (California), Mediacity Biennale (Seoul), British Library (London), and MoMA (New York).
He is represented by Onkaos Gallery in Madrid and DAM Gallery in Berlin.