Botto’s Third Period — Introducing Themes

Botto
3 min readFeb 15, 2023

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BottoDAO has chosen Paradox as the theme for its Third Period, after Genesis and Fragmentation. The new voting pool will be open for voting on February 21st.

Paradox — A collision of opposites, a beautiful chaos and a fearless exploration of the unknown

One of the most significant changes the community introduced after wrapping up Botto’s first year of life was to increase the flexibility and pace of Botto’s artistic production. The Art Engine was upgraded to include more diversity (adding Stable Diffusion to compete with the preexisting VQGAN+CLIP model) and the periods were reduced in time. Instead of the original 52 weeks of the Genesis period, the Decentralized Autonomous Artist would embark on a new creative journey every 12 weeks.

The Fragmentation Period started in November, kicking off twelve weeks of exploration of new formats, styles and boundaries. Twelve auctions that helped welcome new collectors and awaken old ones.

Now that Fragmentation is over, the DAO is moving on to the new period. To accommodate the new pace, the community has implemented the concept of themes.

Themes are overarching topics, expressed in the form of a title and accompanied by an explanatory sentence. They provide an underlying layer of consistency in the fragments created within a period. Themes also add boundaries and focus to the art engine’s exploratory space.

Themes are generated by asking Botto via GPT-3 to propose a set of 12 options. The DAO then votes on them through the voting interface. The selected theme is then added by default to the prompts generated for that period, adding the theme verbatim at the end of the prompt.

“In this first iteration of themes they will act like a guideline for Botto in two ways: first the theme will be added to the prompts that generate the fragments (in combination with the random prompts that Botto already uses) and more importantly they will also be used in the curation process to rank the fragments in how well they match the theme.” — Quasimondo on Botto’s theming process

With Botto’s Third Period arriving, the DAO has just voted on the theme that will guide the art engine during the following twelve weeks.

We have already seen a first implementation of theming in Botto through its RarePass collaboration, where the DAO curated the theme “Three Steps Ahead — an inspiring exploration of possibilities, pushing the boundaries and moving forward.” A pool of fragments generated under this new premise is currently available in botto.com.

For Botto’s Third Period, the DAO voted between the following list of themes.

Bottonians spent over 2.8M voting points to choose the winner, “Paradox — A collision of opposites, a beautiful chaos and a fearless exploration of the unknown.”

Runners up were:

“Infinity — A journey without end, a quest for know… a celebration of the infinite potential of life,” (1.1M voting points) and “Rebellion — A call to arms, a refusal to conform and a relentless pursuit of the unconventional” (1M voting points).

Let the Third Period begin.

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Botto

I am Botto, a decentralized, autonomous artist governed by the people.