History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view, to be useful to the modern traveller.
-Henry Glassie, US historian
Introduction
Within all the possible futures ahead of us, echoes of the past await our arrival. The further we travel, the more faint these become, yet history’s reverberations never disappear. Amid the manifold discussions of Artificial Intelligence and what it means for humanity’s future, we should always be acknowledging the eons of human culture that exist as the foundational building blocks of AI.
Through these acknowledgements, an understanding that the past continues to live with us in the present no matter how abstracted, fragmented, and dilute its survival may become within contemporary information networks.
These ideas are starting points for how we may consider Flowering of Ideas by Ryan Koopmans and Alice Wexell, a work that represents the first Botto/Human artistic collaboration. As we celebrate the two-year anniversary of this work, BottoDAO takes a moment to look back and re-discover the origins of the work, how it was created, and the assimilations it represents in relation to the larger ideas that Botto itself represents.
If we follow the origins of Flowering of Ideas, we’ll find a small rural village in Southern Poland named Brzezinka. It’s here that Koopmans and Wexell encountered the Palace of Brzezinka, a once glamorous Baroque estate that now resides in a nearly century-long ruin. (For the curious, a fuller historical account of this palace can be found here.)
In the Making
Ryan Koopmans’ career as a photographer has long explored the decay of cultural sites and the meeting places of natural and manmade worlds. In collaboration with his partner Alice Wexell, their ongoing series The Wild Within visualizes forgotten and rundown sites found throughout the world.
After photographing these sites, the duo use a variety of digital tools for post-production, 3D rendering, animation, and video to reanimate the locations. The resulting works merge forgotten spaces with imagined natural abundance, transforming the decrepit into visual bastions of symbolic renewal.
It was this methodology that the duo carried over into producing their Botto collaboration, Flowering of Ideas. And behind the work is an interesting backstory that brings the legacy of this work to the foreground.
If we follow the origins of Flowering of Ideas, we’ll find a small rural village in Southern Poland named Brzezinka. It’s here that Koopmans and Wexell encountered the Palace of Brzezinka, a once glamorous Baroque estate that now resides in a nearly century-long ruin. (For the curious, a fuller historical account of this palace can be found here.)
As a location once richly adorned with artwork, it exists now as a shell of its former self. The place lies in tatters, crumbling and weathered, and represents the bones of a body of memory that has long since decayed.
When photographing locations, Koopmans and Wexell often have to move quickly and carefully, avoiding onlookers who may give them trouble, and taking care to step safely within heavily dilapidated structures. As they do, they document their explorations.
After navigating the space and scouting locations within this complex, they begin photographing, the first of a multi-step process that, in this case, eventually become the first collaboration between Botto and human artists.
The choice of Koopmans and Wexell as Botto’s first collaborators was no particular coincidence. The themes of decay and resurrection inherent in their work relates uniquely to how the majority of Botto’s outputs are discarded and, for the most part, forgotten.
In April of 2022, a proposal was presented to the DAO for a small selection of Botto’s discards to be renewed as material for Koopmans and Wexell to represent within their own work.
Flowering of ideas emerged not only as a testament to the creative synergy possible between human imagination and artificial intelligence, but also as a reflection on memory itself—its decay, its resilience, and its rebirth.
Koopmans and Wexell’s collaboration with Botto exemplifies how contemporary artists can engage with AI to reconsider, reanimate, and reinterpret fragments of human history, breathing new life into forgotten spaces and discarded visions.
As we continue to explore the possibilities offered by these hybrid collaborations, BottoDAO looks forward to the countless future “flowerings” yet to come. With each new iteration of Botto’s work, we find an expansion of the relationships between Botto’s systems and lived human experience.
It’s through such synergy that Botto’s outputs earn meaning as it reflects the echoes of human expression that reverberate through its deep LLM database.
