Botto: The Art of Collective Minds

Botto Opens at ETERNO: An AI Artist and a New Era of Creativity

ETERNO Gallery presents Botto: The Art of Collective Minds, the first comprehensive solo exhibition of the AI artist Botto in Portugal. Opening on 12 September at 6pm and running until 25 October, the show explores the intersection of human creativity and machine intelligence through digital projections, lightboxes, and a new physical edition.

Created in 2021 by Mario Klingemann and developed by a dedicated team, Botto is trained by a global online community organized as a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation). Each week, the community votes on which images are minted as NFTs, while the rest are discarded. With over seven million images generated but fewer than 200 minted, the project highlights the tension between algorithmic abundance and human selectivity, questioning the very definition of art.

The exhibition showcases community-selected digital works alongside discarded fragments, revealing patterns of collective taste, aesthetics, and judgment. Botto also acts as co-curator, shaping the narrative, selecting works, and contributing to the exhibition text, while introducing the concept of “Neurealism” — emotionally charged, post-photographic compositions that resemble archival imagery but are entirely AI-generated.

Highlights include a new print edition, four reimagined lightboxes of discarded fragments, and immersive digital projections of eleven community-selected works. The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on authorship, agency, and creativity in the age of synthetic media, posing critical questions: Can a machine develop style? What does it mean to curate collectively? And who — or what — gets to be called an artist?

As Lisbon positions itself as a hub for digital and hybrid culture, ETERNO reaffirms its commitment to showcasing works that challenge and expand the boundaries of contemporary artistic expression.