Vellum LA Presents

The Decentralized Unicists: A Botto Solo Show

Vellum LA
7673 Melrose Ave
Los Angeles CA 90046

Opening Reception
Thursday, February 17, 2022 | 7-9PM
VIP Preview: 6-7PM

On View: February 17, 2022 - March 6, 2022

Curated by Jesse Damiani and Sinziana Velicescu, The Decentralized Unicists is the first solo show ever by a “decentralized autonomous artist.” Botto is an algorithm that produces work based on feedback from a community of surrounding stakeholders.

The Decentralized Unicists brings this (literally) digital-born artist into a physical gallery setting—extending the social experiment initiated by the Botto community. In this act, Botto becomes an emissary artist from the future, revealing how the new modes by which art, emerging technologies, and society might interact in the years (or days) to come.

 The notion of the singularity, the moment in which AI irreversibly surpasses human intelligence and capability, is freighted with anxiety in popular culture. Sci-fi narratives like Terminator and The Matrix imagine a post-singularity world in which humans are hunted and enslaved by machines. But the practical reality of artificial intelligence in the present, while not without cause for concern, is far removed from these scenarios. Botto and its surrounding community, known in the blockchain ecosystem as a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, propose a different framework for a future suffused with AI: unicity. In this paradigm, AI isn’t separate from human life, but rather has become inextricable from what it means to be human in the first place. As the early fragments and works from Botto’s “mind” attest, the creative possibilities of this human-machine collaboration are staggering. For some, this provocation will spark wonder—others dread—but rigorous initiatives like Botto offer a glimpse of the shape our relationships to ourselves, each other, and our machine counterpoints might one day take.

Created by an international group of engineers and based on an idea that came from the German artist Mario Klingemann, a global trailblazer in the field of AI art, Botto responds to its community and learns day by day from the collective feedback of its community of stakeholders. Through continuous learning, Botto evolves its aesthetic and creative proposals, always looking for originality and artistic evolution. 

Using a suite of algorithms designed by Klingemann, Botto connects two historical artistic practices: generative art and decentralized art. Both come together in a one new creative practice thanks to the AI development and blockchain technologies. 

“The idea of building an autonomous entity that is able to be creative or at least co-creative in some form goes back hundreds of years. Literature is full of examples of machines or contraptions that could be seen as some precursor of the idea of AI, from E. T. A. Hoffmann ́s Automata (1814) or Goethe artificial man in Faust (1832).” - Mario Klingemann

The Decentralized Unicists will take place as an in-person NFT exhibition at Vellum LA featuring a curated selection of unminted fragments and minted works by the AI artist. Botto’s work will also be displayed across a series of StandardVision LED billboards around Los Angeles from February 10, 2022 to February 24, 2022 as part of the autonomous AI artist’s citywide takeover of LA during Frieze.