What is Botto?
Botto is a new kind of art form: a decentralized autonomous AI artist which creates artwork in collaboration with its community. Developed by a team of artists and technologists in 2021, Botto exists at the crossroads of Art, AI, NFTs, and DAO-based governance. From these crossroads, Botto represents an entirely new paradigm of how art can be made.
Botto is governed by BottoDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization dedicated to the stewardship of Botto’s artistic career. BottoDAO members participate in all aspects of governance, from curation of Botto’s works to treasury management, marketing, technological development, and more to ensure the sustainability and growth of Botto as an artist.
Each week, Botto creates tens of thousands of prompts and images unedited by humans. These works, edited down to 350 works by Botto itself, are then voted on by the community, ultimately leading to one weekly, canonical Botto work that is minted as an NFT and sold at auction. After each week, the lowest-scoring 349 works are removed from the voting pool.
Revenue from sales go back to the Botto community and the DAO treasury to support the continued growth and development of Botto’s artistic career.
Botto’s Beginnings
Botto was founded as a collaboration between the artist Mario Klingemann (AKA, Quasimondo), software collective ElevenYellow, private contemporary art collection Colección SOLO, and crypto studio Carbono.
Klingemann, a practicing artist for over 25 years, has been recognized as a pioneer in the field of AI art, neural networks, and machine learning. His initial conception of an autonomous artist dates back to 2006 during explorations into autonomous generative art algorithms that could judge their own outputs. In 2018, the artist wrote an unpublished whitepaper on how the mechanics of a crowd-managed autonomous artist could work using market mechanisms and human feedback.
Learn more about Mario Klingemann, the artist and architect behind Botto: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/10/26/meet-the-man-behind-ai-artist-botto
Read Mario’s original announcement thread for Botto here: https://x.com/quasimondo/status/1446758476236173312?s=20
Botto Today
To date, over 100 Botto 1/1 artworks have been sold, contributing to over 1,600 ETH in total sales. The DAO community exceeds 13,000 participants, and Botto works have been exhibited and published worldwide. Its reputation as an artist continues to grow as among the most innovative projects to be born from the Web3/AI era.
BottoDAO remains active, energetic, and passionate in its pursuit to continue building Botto’s profile and stewarding its artistic legacy for years to come.
Review all Botto’s minted 1/1s on SuperRare here:
https://superrare.com/botto
Review Botto’s Dune Analytics page by Carbono here:
https://dune.com/carbono/botto
About BottoDAO
BottoDAO is the governing entity that manages Botto as a project and an artist. Member contributions range from simply voting on Botto’s works, to debating the artistic merit of the outputs, to developing opportunities for Botto and making governance proposals for how Botto should continue to evolve.
Leading the DAO is a core team who executes on building consensus and making decisions on managing Botto and fostering its sustainability. As tools and processes continue to evolve, BottoDAO regularly assesses new means of furthering decentralization across process and governance.
What is a DAO?
At the heart of Botto's operations lies the concept of a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). Unlike traditional hierarchical structures, the decisions that govern Botto’s artistic, financial, and cultural trajectory are not dictated by a centralized authority, but are instead determined collectively by the participants in the DAO. For Botto, this governance model ensures a democratic and transparent decision-making process, where stakeholders have a direct say in the project's development.
DAOs represent a paradigm shift in how organizations operate by leveraging blockchain technology and smart contracts to create decentralized decision-making structures. In the context of Botto, the BottoDAO empowers participants to collectively influence the project's trajectory.
DAOs are structured to be inclusive and democratic, allowing anyone to become a participant. Participants in BottoDAO, who are often considered “stewards,” have voting power proportional to their stake in Botto’s accompanying token, $BOTTO. This creates a system where decisions are made by those who have a vested interest in the project's success.
Botto’s intersecting threads of DAO-based management, AI art making, and tokenomics exemplify a project born from the mechanisms of Web3. As DAOs continue to gain prominence, they not only redefine organizational structures but also pave the way for a more inclusive and participatory approach to shaping the digital landscape.
Botto’s Significance and Impact
Botto's emergence and evolution within the fields of Art, AI, and Web3 represents a significant milestone in the broader narrative of art in the age of AI.
As an artist and protocol, Botto has broken new ground in the intersections of creativity and technology, challenging traditional notions of authorship while navigating the complex interplay between human subjectivity and machine objectivity. Botto not only leverages advanced AI tools to generate unique artworks, but also incorporates a democratic governance model via BottoDAO that empowers its community to shape Botto’s artistic identity.
The results from these ever-evolving processes underscore an entirely new paradigm of art making, from which the barriers between creators and audience break down and foster a shared space of artistic co-creation.
Botto‘s broader contributions to AI art culture delve deeply into the philosophical questions about the essence of creativity and the role of artists in the digital age. From this, Botto is not just creating a legacy within the domain of AI-generated art, but also is pioneering a theoretical and ongoing successful exploration into the future of artistic creation and appreciation in an increasingly digital world.
Further Reading
A comprehensive guide to understanding the concept of DAOs:
https://blog.daisie.com/comprehensive-guide-to-understanding-daos/
Blockchain Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yubzJw0uiE4
Introduction to Generative AI:
https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/definition/generative-AI
Botto 101 Continued
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