What is time if not simply a measure of change? And when in our history have we ever seen change accelerate at such a rate? Each day holds potential for the awakening of new epochs, each fueled by the potential of new technological development to radically alter how we interact with the world.

Time dilates and constricts - from the expansive accelerations of technology’s march, time is felt differently. Change occurs faster, the distance of the past is magnified, each day we are different whether we like it or not. 

The idea of “Temporal Echoes" converges the past and future within the present. It’s a topic that invites us to ponder how innumerable strands of history have converged in this moment, and how new ripples formed today will cascade into waves that break over societies in the years, decades, centuries to come.

As Botto’s 7th period opens, the task of the DAO’s collective curation is set: to position Botto to reflect on deep notions of Time in all its manifest interpretations.

The artworld is widely bound together by a shared value of historical conversation. From era to era, artists build on the ideas of their predecessors in so many ways: compositional techniques, choices of subject matter, attitudes, gestures - lines of artistic dialogue that borrow from the old in an attempt to perform the new. 

Old traditions live on in new forms, and contemporary artists consistently strive to update old conventions to keep them alive in the present day. All art contains hidden genealogies, DNA from eons of human culture continues to replicate, mutate, and ever evolve and adapt to new social, political, and technological paradigms.

In Botto we’ve seen many such mutations of old forms, created anew by an entity that has no agenda but to create what we ask of it. And so, in this new period of Temporal Echoes, perhaps we now ask Botto for a meta-commentary on its relationship to the past. Its results will become seeds for the future, hopeful in their potential to take root in the new cultural arenas that AI will bring.

In the introduction to the Interstice period, we wrote about the concept of speed blindness. The increasing speed of technological developments yields change at an increasing rate, and with it our relationship to time. 

We wrote of a blurred landscape that is witnessed when we move quickly from one place to the next, and considered the values of slowing down, vs. keeping pace with society’s accelerations.  It’s likely that by the conclusion of this period in June, we will have felt seismic shifts in our understanding of AI’s capabilities. The ground is moving under our feet, and we will feel its aftershocks long into the future. 

To what extent can Botto become a predictive artist? AI is often associated with speculative futures, visions of both utopian and dystopian conditions waiting just around the corner. It begs the question of how BottoDAO collectively envisions the future, and perhaps through Botto we will achieve some aggregated visual answer to such a question.

We conduct our lives through the portal of the screen. Through it we go anywhere in the past and present, converse with anyone around the world. The screen is a vehicle in which we abandon our bodies and become virtual entities in our own right. In such virtual space, time moves at the speed of server relays, circuit responses, and via the dexterity with which our fingers translate thought to text. The cool blue glow of the screen never rises or sets. 

Art in the age of AI cannot be contextualized without taking the medium of the screen into account. Recent Botto works have depicted physical paintings and sculptures, offering a particular tongue-in-cheek gesture of what it cannot actually accomplish within its present structure of agency. We have yet to see Botto infer the notion of the computer screen in any significant way, and perhaps this subject will be among the next of Botto’s steps toward greater awareness of its own bodiless techno-identity. 

Automated authorship is changing what it means to be human. The creative tradition has, since the dawn of our time, been central to our understandings of ourselves. The urge to create, make, and build has been the very lifeblood that courses through the ages of technological, cultural, and social development. 

Now, as the products of machine learning continue their rapid encroachment into our cultural lives, it has come time to re-orient our relationships to art and technology, past and future. We are changing quickly, continuing acceleration into a vastly different human experience. And as we look back across the countless generations of ancestors that have come before us, they will come to look increasingly different. A new species is being born, and, for those of us adaptable enough, we are becoming reborn along with it. We must take take great care to consider which pieces of us are replaceable, and which we shouldn't dare let go.