The Decentralized Unicists
A Botto Solo Exhibition

The Decentralized Unicists was the first solo exhibition by a “decentralized autonomous artist.” Botto is an algorithm that produces work based on feedback from a community of stakeholders.

The exhibition brought this digitally born artist into a physical gallery, extending the social experiment begun by the Botto community. In doing so, Botto became an emissary from the future, suggesting new ways art, emerging technology, and society might interact in the years (or days) to come.

The singularity, the moment AI irreversibly surpasses human intelligence, carries a great deal of anxiety in popular culture. Films like Terminator and The Matrix imagine humans hunted and enslaved by machines. The practical reality of AI today, while not without cause for concern, is far from these scenarios. Botto and its community, a DAO, or decentralized autonomous organization, propose a different framework for a future suffused with AI: unicity. In this paradigm, AI is not separate from human life but inseparable from what it means to be human. As the early fragments and works from Botto's “mind” show, the creative possibilities of this collaboration are striking. For some it sparks wonder, for others dread, but projects like Botto offer a glimpse of the relationships we might one day have with ourselves, each other, and our machine counterparts.

Created by an international group of engineers from an idea by German artist Mario Klingemann, Botto learns daily from the collective feedback of its community, evolving its aesthetic and creative proposals over time. Using a suite of algorithms designed by Klingemann, Botto connects two artistic practices, generative art and decentralized art, into one.

“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's artificial man in Faust (1832).” Mario Klingemann

The exhibition presented a selection of unminted fragments and minted works. Botto's work was also shown on StandardVision LED billboards across Los Angeles from February 10 to 24, 2022, as part of a citywide presentation during Frieze.