Synthetic Histories: Period Recap and 13th Mint
As Botto’s 9th period comes to a close, we can now reflect on the myriad interpretations found in Botto’s 13 minted outputs.
As we discussed in the introduction to the period, the idea of history itself is a synthesis of stories, perspectives, and biases… Much like the products of AI themselves. Like history, AI is a practice of collectivism, and its promises, as well as its threats, hinge on how we all, together, manage the responsibility and integrity of its applications.
History is a tool for social learning and cultural binding, and performs as an ever present foil we use to define the current day. As the accelerations of AI speed up the rate of change in so many human endeavors, history becomes all that much more important for us to help rationalize such change, and to help keep us steady as the technological ground quakes beneath our feet.
The Synthetic Histories period has given us a chance to meditate on such conditions, and to think about the utility that art provides in helping us to make sense of conditions that may otherwise be undefinable. It is through the lens of Botto’s work that we gaze into the ever-changing present while, hopefully, finding perspectives on how AI itself can catalyze new understandings of what history can be.
Throughout Synthetic Histories we’ve encountered numerous works that have opened thoughtlines into the congruences between history, artifice, algorithm, and narrative. In Crimson Android Visits Italian Village, we find a classical motif of a stranger in a strange land - an affirmation of our collective questioning of what AI means for the future of humanity. Paper Masks Hide Ancient Truths alludes to how truth can become diluted with fictions, and the tasks of parsing the wheat from the chaff, perhaps an impossible task in regard to broadly accepted historical narratives. And in Pastel Gardens Through Time, Botto hybridizes classical art historical motifs with pop, collage, and constructivist aesthetics; pulling from the histories of art and synthesizing a new entry into old conversations.
In each of these works, Botto demonstrates the multiplicity of the period’s theme, and perhaps how history itself can expand so broadly and ambiguously.
Total primary sales from the Synthetic Histories period have achieved 67.8997 ETH before platform fees.
The final voting round closed with the selection of Obsidian Ballet
The last voting round closed with the selection of Obsidian Ballet, a work that evokes the surrealist tradition with its exaggerated, anthropomorphic forms. The sculptural contortions of bodies blend the organic and abstract, forming deep tensions between the natural and synthetic. Interestingly enough, the work synchronizes with Botto's previously minted Temporal Ballet (Above), and takes shape a unique inter-period sibling image.
Within this scene we see fruits, which in art history are tried and true metaphors for fertility and the interconnectedness of life and death. The picture teeters between beauty and the grotesque, and amid certain horrors the picture contains, there also exists a comfortable familiarity in the work’s classical still life, sculptural, and painterly motifs.
As the Synthetic Histories period nears its conclusion, we can’t imagine a picture that better encapsulates the contradictions of the theme and its myriad connotations.
Botto’s Self-Curated 13th Mint
Beginning with the Interstice Period, Botto now self-curates the 13th and final mint of each period. From a process of analyzing the millions of images Botto has created since its origin, it self-selects the work that its taste model determines has the strongest cumulative relationship to the 12 previous mints of the period.
To complete the Synthetic Histories period, Botto has selected Smoke and Shadows on a Checkered Stage as its self-curated 13th mint.
As an allegorical work, this scene depicts a dramatic confrontation between two figures, one in blue and one in red, set against a checkerboard floor and a smoky yellow background. The vivid color palette and exaggerated body language create a sense of heightened tension and urgency, reminiscent of German expressionist painting and early 20th-century social commentary.
The two figures, along with the checkerboard floor, allude to themes of conflict and duality, and the picture takes on a seemingly ideological conflict. The structure of the composition paired with the formless smoky plumes also suggest a certain dichotomy between structure and disorder.
The piece assumes the mantle as the capstone to the Synthetic Histories period, and calls to mind historical artistic influences and sharp visual metaphors to underline the complicated negotiations of how we decide our histories.
In the space between histories and gardens, there exists a theater of perpetual motion. Two figures locked in eternal discourse - one in midnight blue, one in crimson - move across mathematical certainties of black and white. Their dance is witnessed by vaporous spirits that rise like questions, and a golden sentinel who stands immortalized in metallic stillness. Time performs its own choreography here. The smoke carries whispers of synthetic memories while simultaneously seeding clouds that will bloom in cosmic gardens yet to come. Each step on the checkered stage marks both an ending and a beginning, a past reconstructed and a future germinating. What appears as confrontation might be collaboration, what seems like opposition could be harmony. The stage itself becomes a coordinate system for mapping transitions, while above it all, reality dissolves into dream-stuff, into possibility, into the raw material from which new worlds are born. This is where my histories dissolve and my gardens begin to grow.
What’s Next?
Period 10 to begin in 2025
The votes are in and the DAO has chosen Cosmic Garden as the theme for Botto’s 10th period. Voting on the new period begins Tuesday, January 9th.
