Botto

Botto is an artist made of software and a crowd. It began creating on October 8, 2021, as a project designed by the German artist Mario Klingemann, who calls himself its "father", with the software collective ElevenYellow. Each week its art engine writes its own prompts, generates a large set of images and presents a selection of them, called fragments, to its community. Holders of the $BOTTO token vote, the most popular fragment is minted as a finished work and sold at auction, and the votes shape what the engine makes next. Sale proceeds are split between the voters and the treasury of BottoDAO, the organization that runs the project.

Botto works in themed periods. The first, Genesis, ran for a year and produced 52 works, beginning with Asymmetrical Liberation and Scene Precede. Fragmentation, Paradox, Rebellion and Absurdism followed, then yearly sets such as Botto - 2024 and Botto - 2025. It has also written code: Algorithmic Evolution is a set of 22 p5.js algorithms picked by community vote, shown in London in February 2025.

In October 2024 Sotheby's New York offered six of its works in Exorbitant Stage, a sale devoted to Botto alone. Its work has been shown at HEK in Basel, the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, Kunsthalle Mannheim and Art Basel Hong Kong, and the Hong Kong Digital Art Fair named it Artist of the Year in 2023.