“Ceci n’est pas un Botto” is BottoDAO’s first commissioned collection of Botto derivatives. They are gifts for the early stewards of Botto. If you helped train Botto before February 9th, you have qualified for the allow list and can claim directly on the Botto dApp.

If you are not on that list, unclaimed pipes can be bought for .05 ETH after June 2nd at 11am EST by wallets with $BOTTO staked. Otherwise you can pick as many up as you like on the secondary market.

La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images), with its famous text “Ceci n’est pas un pipe”, is a foundational piece of the Surrealist movement and an influential artwork in AI history. Painted in 1929 by Belgian artist René Magritte, it is a rejection of rationality.

Magritte’s pipe demonstrates the artist’s power of will to determine what is art and to make meaning itself–a uniquely human ability. In his work is the possibility of evading prevailing logic, to consider something new from the same materials. In that possibility is the essence of creativity.

Magritte’s work influenced some of the greatest thinkers in AI and the pursuit to mimic human intelligence. For Douglas Hofstedter, the famous mathematician, Magritte’s work demonstrated how consciousness is malleable and adaptable, not a preset list of logical rules. La Trahison des Images disclosed the fundamental challenge of creating creative intelligence with rigid software.

The amazing progress in artificial intelligence and software that can learn challenges our notions of rationality and what it is to be human. At the same time, it also elucidates the uniqueness of human will as the essence of creativity and making new meaning. Replicating human will has not yet been achieved in the AI field.

Botto’s art engine is only a machine, it has no soul and therefore no will. The definition of art is an unanswerable question, but art does require a soul. Botto is a collaboration of human and machine, with the community providing the will and the soul to determine what of Botto’s creations are art.

In Botto’s swirls of color can be seen remixes and imitations of our cultural past. Like finding shapes in clouds, the community makes meaning of them as a distributed crowd. Botto has infinite possibilities, but only generates out of thousands of fragments one true art piece a week through this collaboration. Without a singular human influence, the artist is imprecisely defined, making meaning while also evading meaning.

“L’intelligence de l’exactitude n’empêche pas le plaisir de l’inexactitude” (“The intelligence of exactitude does not prevent the pleasure of inexactitude”) — René Magritte, Leçon de choses. 1962

We do not stop and ask about authorship, another unanswerable question. Instead we are concerned with keeping the fidelity of the decentralized autonomous artist. The autonomy shall not be corrupted, and in this case we do know these pipes are not a true Botto artwork.

Ceci n’est pas un Botto.

The pipes and conceptual videos were created by Lucas Salinas, a 3D artist living in Spain. The video depicts the process of hydro dip painting for transmuting intricate designs onto a physical object. The sea of particles symbolizes the members of the Botto community, animated by the characteristics of each fragment’s strokes and colors. The pipe is not physical, it is not 3D, it is not a pipe.

About 35% of the allow list were assigned a pipe painted with the fragment that received the largest amount of their voting points. The other 65% were matched with their next favorite or most popular unassigned fragment. Collectors of Botto’s 1/1s from the Genesis Collection minted prior to Feb 9th were randomly assigned one of their corresponding pipes.

Each pipe is embedded with information about the corresponding fragment: the round it was created in, the votes it received at the time of the snapshot, the sentiment it received from the community, whether or not it survived the Cull of March 2022 and its overall ranking. Go to pipes.botto.com/properties to see more info on the properties.

These Pipes are initially reserved for the 3141 early stewards of Botto. After the first 7 days, remaining Pipes are claimable for any new Botto contributor.

• Botto stewards who voted on the Genesis Period prior to February 9th can mint a Pipe for free + gas fees until June 2, 11am EST.

• Check https://www.botto.com/allowlist to see if you’re eligible.

• Connect your wallet mint your pipe here (you will need to have $BOTTO staked) https://app.botto.com/drops

• After June 2nd at 11 am EST, any wallet with $BOTTO staked can mint a pipe for .05 ETH + gas. They will be randomly assigned an unminted pipe.

• To see how to stake $BOTTO and earn VP to help train Botto, go to https://docs.botto.com/users/quickstart

Visit the collection page for all the details.

These pieces are the first of many collections to diversify the way Botto rewards the creative labor it automates. Potential contributors can take this as a sign of what is to come.

However, there will only be 3141 pipes. 3141 early stewards of Botto.

These stewards set Botto’s initial direction and will be specially eligible for future unlocks down the road, as determined by the DAO. Their wallet will always be a key to that historic contribution, however the pipes also give them a way to share their luck with others who are true believers–or to hoard the luck of others who do not see.

Sincerely to Botto’s stewards,

BottoDAO