Botto's work, like Pepe memes themselves, operate within the arena of cultural memetics. The Notable Pepe collaboration isn't just an artistic experiment—it’s a dialogue with the digital past, one that invites the community to rethink what constitutes both "rare" and "valuable" in our evolving culture.

Collaborations between entities like Botto and Notable Pepe find unexpected alignments. The release of Series 7, Card 1 is not just another meme in the vast swamps of the internet, but a synergy that occurs between two projects that wade deep into both new media culture to the tune of historical echoes as heard through the wide open spans of internet dialogues.

Originally emerging from 4chan, Pepes evolved from simple internet frogs to cultural artifacts that have become celebrated as a near-sacred icon among NFT communities. The Rare Pepe memes, born from internet obscurity, serve as the perfect muse for Botto’s intricate AI-generated artistry, representing a cultural meeting point that refracts cultural exchange through a particularly green prism. Botto, through its community-curated process, reinterprets this icon, and renews its ever-mutable context once again.

Publicly accessible AI tools, and the artwork that spawns from them, are charting a new path in the vast art historical landscape. Combined with the potentials of blockchain tools, we now witness a new frontier for creativity, one that is being pioneered by Botto as the world's first decentralized autonomous artist. Through this collaboration, Rare Pepe embraces these still-experimental and new means of art making, and celebrates AI's capacity to reshape culture and art in the 21st century.

It may seem surprising, but the malleability of a meme like Pepe has deep intersections with ideas on AI. Artificial intelligence is trained on vast oceans of data, compilations of human culture that AI tools distill through interpretation and narrative. When we think of AI we can’t ignore the breadth of human experience it encompasses. It allows us to consider ourselves, humans, as a collective meaning-making entity. So too does the idea of the meme itself represent a product of collective meaning-making. One might be inclined to think that the  future AI will make our memes for us, but it is we, all of us, consciously or not, that decide together which cultural relics will persevere and adapt amid accelerating cultural change. 

Pepe the Frog is built to last, and with each new iteration and re-usage of the character, it only grows more durable as time moves on. New entries into the Pepeverse will continue to fold into our lives, and with that, the data sets that are training future generations of machine learning tools. As a simple cartoon figure, it embodies a nascent online culture like no other character in recent memory. As both a classical meme and a product of technological progress, the green frog has become a ripe canvas on which free and open online expression can be asserted.

Botto itself is a different kind of cultural proposition, one that suggests, daringly, that art making can be automated, de-personalized, and can represent a collective vision that isn’t limited by language, geography, or any beliefs outside of the idea that art matters. This will no doubt not be the last time that Botto reflects particular and specific strands of contemporary culture, and we also don’t doubt that the artist Botto itself will continue to be recognized as such.

Notable Pepes, Fake Rares and Rare Pepes are collections of rare, meme-inspired digital artworks, each based on the iconic image of Pepe the Frog. Originally, Pepe the Frog was created by Matt Furie in 2005 and quickly spread across the internet, particularly on image boards like 4chan. Over time, Pepe became a symbol of online meme culture, sometimes associated with various subgroups. However, with the advent of NFTs, Pepe took on a new life in the digital asset space, eventually leading to the $PEPE token - one of the fastest tokens ever to reach 1B market cap. 

Initially established on the Counterparty Protocol on Bitcoin, Rare Pepes were first traded on Ethereum via the Emblem Vault Project, and ultimately directly minted as erc20s only with Notables. In the case of Notables, the Ethereum NFTs allow collectors to own a unique piece of Pepe art that can be traced back to its creation directly on the ethereum network, through its embedded metadata that verifies its authenticity and ownership history.

The Notable Pepes collection represents a series of most contemporary, high-end, and truly artistic meme-inspired NFT cards, each portraying Pepe in different forms, often referencing pop culture, art history, or internet lore. The cards are released on pepe.wtf and then freely tradable on all popular NFT marketplaces like OpenSea, with varying levels of rarity and unique artistic flair. Some notable artworks in the series include “Balloon Pepe,” “Pepesi: Taste the Drip,” and “Notamoto,” a parody of Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous founder of Bitcoin. Initially founded by Vincent Van Dough, Notable Pepes quickly gained notoriety with an artist roster second to none. The master curator VVD took it upon himself to round up the best digital artists of our time to release series and cards which would make waves in the industry and cement Notables as a force for artistic expression unlike any other the meme space had seen before. Series 7 reflects this with a highly curated lineup of top talent.

From its humble beginnings it has, among other things, become symbolic of NFT culture and an adjacency to entirely new modes of artistic dissemination. Botto has taken to task to breathe new life into this familiar figure, and carries it into deeper conversations about cultural history, artistic authorship, and automated production.

AI's entry into the world of art has given us an opportunity to challenge traditionally-held beliefs about what art is, how it's made, and who it's for. Botto, by blending blockchain and AI technology with the desire to produce artwork, points a hard finger at the question of what authorship can look like in the age of AI.  In partnership with Notable Pepe and pepe.wtf, Botto’s offering preserves not just the cultural relevance of Pepe, but also its deeper symbolic weight. This Rare Pepe series is not merely a recreation of the familiar meme but a commentary on how memetics, as a form of art, captures the ever-shifting dialogue of online culture. By imposing boundaries on its otherwise freeform, generative process, Botto highlights how cultural artifacts like Pepe can be repurposed to hold onto the essence of past internet moments while reshaping them for future audiences.

Through each Notable Pepe artwork, artists navigate a delicate balance between preservation and reinvention, leaving us to ponder how much of the original meme we retain and how much we let evolve. This is a statement on the ephemerality of digital culture—an attempt to capture fleeting moments of humor, subversion, and community that Pepe has come to represent, and reframe them in the context of curated art. Botto’s Notable Pepe feels like a necessary experiment in the world of memetics, where cultural dialogue is constrained but still fertile ground for innovation.

Just as the bog keeps the frog hidden, Botto’s constrained curation peels back the layers of cultural noise, revealing what’s timeless beneath the surface. As we step into the bog, we can only speculate on what new forms will arise from the interplay of frogs and machine-led art, may it be from within or outside the pepe.wtf community.