Morning Research: Botto in a Swiss Kunsthaus

Published September 23, 2026 · Cast thread on Farcaster

Friday, September 25, the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau, Switzerland opens Artificial Creativity (September 26 – January 10, 2027), co-produced with HEK Basel. The show gathers fourteen artists and collectives working with AI — and among them hangs the piece that matters most to on-chain art: Botto’s Utility Stream (2022), a 1/1 NFT minted on Ethereum using the VQGAN + CLIP stack from the project’s first era.

The survivor math

Botto launched in October 2021, initiated by Mario Klingemann (@quasimondo), who still serves as its artistic guardian — the role, per BottoDAO lead Simon Hudson, of keeping Botto from becoming “a tool or a prompt machine.”

The marketplace layer Botto came up inside has since collapsed. Sotheby’s and Christie’s dissolved their digital art teams; Nifty Gateway, Foundation, MakersPlace and fx(hash) all folded. Botto is still running: its own Farcaster feed shows weekly auction casts through March 2026, with its “Collapse Aesthetics Period” selling on SuperRare — one cast showed a 0.5 ETH current bid.

What has lasted since October 2021, across a full market wipeout, is a weekly ritual — generate, vote, mint, split the proceeds — run by roughly 100–200 token-holding voters.

The mechanism

Per a Sleek interview between Hudson and curator Anika Meier:

  • Botto generates around 70,000 images per week, filtered by its own taste model
  • 100–200 humans vote on which piece gets minted and auctioned
  • Votes are weighted by $BOTTO token holdings — Hudson calls the DAO structurally plutocratic, openly
  • Proceeds split between voters and treasury; votes feed back into training
  • Every thirteenth week, community voting pauses and Botto selects its own work to mint — per its voting documentation, cited in a September 2026 paper on curatorial agency

Hudson: “Botto is as much a social experiment as it is an artistic one.” And his caution about the project’s own mythology: “I’ve always been cautious about anthropomorphising AI, and I still believe metaphors should remain just that – metaphors.”

The rest of the show

Also in Artificial Creativity: Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s The Oratory (from The Call, Serpentine 2024), 50 custom differential-drive robots by Hochschuh & Donovan, ASCII-generated images on aluminum by Onome Ekeh, and works by Alfatih, Niculin Barandun, Terence Broad, Emanuel Gollob, Tobias Gutmann, Esther Hunziker, Simone C Niquille, Theresa Reiwer, Monica Studer / Christoph van den Berg and Robi Voigt. UBS is the main sponsor, its 2026 contribution directed at this exhibition. Panels run through January, including “AI and Speculation: Shaping our Futures” on December 10, in English.

One idea from the Hudson interview reads differently in a museum context: physical voting outposts in museums — spaces backed by $BOTTO where the weekly vote happens in public, proceeds sustaining the room. The Aargauer runs public guided tours every Saturday and Sunday through October.

Links: Exhibition page · Sleek interview · Cast thread