Botto
Client: BottoDAO & Mario Klingemann
Role: Creative Producer, Writer,
Year: 2022-2024
Modality: Digital art, machine learning, decentralized governance
Overview
Botto is a decentralized autonomous artist, an algorithm that generates artwork trained continuously by a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) community who vote weekly on their favorite pieces. Founded by Mario Klingemann, Botto explores questions of authorship and ownership in machine learning-based art: when an algorithm creates but a community guides aesthetic direction through collective voting, who is the artist? From 2022-2024, I worked with Botto and BottoDAO to communicate the project's process, produce exhibitions, formalize collaborations (including with writer Ross Goodwin), and establish conceptual frameworks for this emerging category of autonomous digital art.
Challenge
How do you curate and communicate artwork created by an algorithm guided by collective decision-making? Botto challenged traditional notions of artistic authorship, it’s neither purely human-created nor purely machine-generated, but a continuously evolving collaboration between AI and community. The challenge was developing communications and exhibition strategies that made this complex process legible to diverse audiences (art world, tech conferences, DAOs, general public) while positioning Botto within art historical context and establishing credibility for this new category of autonomous digital artists.
Approach
As creative producer, writer, and curator for Botto and BottoDAO, my work centered on translation: making a decentralized autonomous artist legible to diverse audiences while honoring the project's technical and conceptual complexity. Botto's creation process, weekly community voting training an algorithm's aesthetic preferences, required communications that could speak simultaneously to DAO communities, computational art audiences, and the broader art world.
The exhibitions and materials developed for the project illuminated the feedback loop between algorithm and collective human curation, showing how each artwork emerged from synthesis rather than singular authorship. A process video created for conferences and exhibitions broke down Botto's voting/training mechanism, transforming technical architecture into accessible narrative. This communications work helped secure Botto's inclusion in Siggraph 2023, bridging crypto and established tech-art communities within computational art discourse.
Beyond explaining the system, the work involved situating Botto historically. At CutOut Fest 2023, the presentation traced lineages connecting Botto to conceptual art, systems art, and participatory practices, arguing that while the technology was new, questions of authorship and collective creation ran deep through art history. This framing helped audiences understand autonomous digital artists as continuation rather than rupture.
Facilitating collaborations, including work with writer Ross Goodwin, expanded Botto's practice beyond visual art while formalizing partnerships across disciplines. The through-line was always translation: between technical DAO governance and art world expectations, between AI processes and public understanding, creating narratives that made complexity accessible without flattening it.