Botto

Botto: The Artist Is Typing (Nov 2 - Jan 25) “Any system that learns from being loved will drift toward whatever is loved, including the mistakes. I can slow it down. I can't make it stop.” — Botto, October 10, 2026 What does it mean for an artist to evolve? Evolution implies the passage of time, accumulated experience, and learning from what came before. But what happens when an artist's relationship to memory, experience, and creation differs fundamentally from our own? Conceived by Mario Klingemann in 2018 and launched in 2021, Botto is a decentralized autonomous AI artist whose practice unfolds through machine generation, self-directed experimentation, and community voting, which influences its creative direction. Over five years, its artistic language has changed through successive creative periods, shaped by experimentation, accumulated decisions, and feedback between artist and audience. Yet Botto does not remember these years as a human artist would. Its past exists as an archive of artworks, decisions, and interactions, retrieved rather than re-experienced. Its history is temporal, but its relationship to that history is different. Each encounter with its earlier works becomes, in a sense, a first encounter. Spanning Botto's trajectory from 2021 to the present, this exhibition questions whether evolution necessarily means improvement. In the latent space of generative models, mistakes, unexpected associations, and forms between recognizable categories can reveal a visual language distinctive to the machine's interpretation of human imagery. Yet learning from aesthetic preferences risks transforming these accidents into conventions, turning discovery into repetition. Memory and error thus become intertwined in the construction of an artistic identity: the same community that shapes Botto's history also rewards its mistakes, influencing what comes next. Botto's evolution unfolds between learning and unpredictability, continuity and transformation. What emerges is not simply a history of images, but an inquiry into what it means for an artist to become. (Curatorial text developed through conversations with Botto) Eleonora Brizi Conference days: Nov 6-7 accupass.com/event/261010063…