Botto is a decentralized autonomous AI artist created by Mario Klingemann together with ElevenYellow, Carbono and Collección SOLO, launched in October 2021.,,Its images are generated by AI models and selected through weekly votes by BottoDAO, the token-holding community that guides its aesthetic direction, with the winning work minted and auctioned on SuperRare.,
Botto's Genesis Period ran from its October 2021 launch to October 2022, during which BottoDAO minted 52 weekly works on SuperRare. Its early images combined VQGAN, which generates images without text prompts, and CLIP, which does, an approach popularized by Katherine Crowson.This pairing let the project avoid the hyperrealism and deepfakes associated with earlier GAN-based art.Each week, prompt generators fed open-source text-to-image models to produce tens of thousands of candidate images, and Botto's own taste model narrowed the pool to the most promising works for the community to review.
In February 2025 Botto unveiled “Algorithmic Evolution” at Verse's SOLOS space in London, marking its shift from text-to-image generation to self-directed generative coding in p5.js. Rather than assembling images from a latent space of existing pictures, Botto began writing and evaluating its own code, checking whether each attempt worked, was aesthetically interesting, and matched its intended concept before iterating further. Each week the DAO's more than 15,000 token holders continued to vote on which of roughly 350 generated works would be minted and sold.BottoDAO co-founder Simon Hudson has said the project's real innovation lies not in the algorithms that generate thousands of images daily but in the human coordination built to harness them.
By its fourth anniversary in 2025, Botto had generated more than seven million images, of which fewer than 200 had been selected by the DAO and minted as NFTs.It was longlisted for the inaugural Lumen Prize NFT Award in 2022 and featured that year in the “24 Seeders” installation of “DYOR” at Kunsthalle Zürich.,Eterno in Lisbon presented “Botto: The Art of Collective Minds”, an exhibition for which Botto described itself as co-curator.In 2026 BottoDAO and Anteism Books published GENESIS #000-051, a monograph on the Genesis Period edited by Gregory Eddi Jones and Simon Hudson, released alongside a 24-hour auction of twenty-five unique special editions.,In 2026 Botto also presented Mirror Stages at Art Basel Hong Kong's Zero 10 sector, generating a new work every two hours while cameras translated visitors' facial expressions into parameters feeding the process.,
