Cyborg DAO

Cyborg DAO dates its beginnings to February 2022.³ Its stated purpose is to acquire important works of AI art.³ One of the collective’s writers found a way to pose that question through a face. In Botto’s Newfangled Likeness, the face seems to disappear into its surroundings. Looking at it, the writer wondered where creative responsibility lay in a work attributed to Botto.⁴ It is an unusually specific account of what held someone’s attention after a work entered a collection. The group’s own catalogue offers another way to see what its members chose to put before an audience.⁵ It names the artists, individual works and projects, often showing several works from a series close together.⁵

The distinction between collecting and making becomes less tidy in the collective’s relationship with Botto. Botto’s community documentation names Cyborg DAO as the first group selected for a community access pass, in recognition of its early support for Botto. Holding a Turing Key qualified a member to mint the pass, which generated voting points for participation in Botto.⁶ A Turing Key is also how Cyborg DAO describes membership in its own organisation.³ Members can bring an artist or a work to the attention of the group and propose an acquisition. The first vote takes place in the members’ channel. If the group agrees to proceed, custodians of the treasury coordinate the transaction.³ A public receipt records the result of that process. It cannot say which member first saw the picture, who spoke for it, or which comparisons carried the discussion. The collective’s catalogue gives those purchases a second, visible arrangement once the decisions have been made.⁵ That invitation takes members beyond proposing acquisitions to their own collective.⁶ One concerns the art that members want their collective to hold. The other concerns the decisions in which a member can participate through Botto. The invitation to take part explains a relationship that would be hard to reconstruct from a list of token transfers alone.

Bard Ionson’s The Past Paints gives the eye another face to contend with.⁵ It reached the collection wallet in January 2024.⁷ From a distance the bright patches suggest features, but the closer one looks, the less cooperative the surface becomes. White and grey break across orange and black.⁷ A coarse grid interrupts the outline that would otherwise let the eye settle on a single expression.⁷ The collective exhibits this work in its selection from Ionson’s Painting with Fire: A History in GANs.⁷ The title of the series puts the technology in a historical frame. The picture itself offers a more immediate experience of trying to recognise someone in a field of marks. In the essay about Botto, a face recedes into its background. In Ionson’s work, recognition keeps coming and going as the eye moves across the grid.⁴

Jacqui Kenny’s Observation #028 offers a quieter kind of uncertainty.⁸ A narrow house stands close to a bend in a road.⁸ There is little to interrupt the view beyond it, just the dry land and a pale sky.⁸ The group’s catalogue lists the image under Moments of Argleton Lane.⁵ The token describes Observations of Argleton Lane as the third part of Kenny’s series. This edition reached cyborgdao.eth in August 2023.⁸ Roope Rainisto’s Life In West America is present in the same wallet through the BrainDrops contract.⁹ Rainisto describes the series as an investigation of America, both the place and the idea, using models trained for the project and a pictorial language drawn from traditional photography.¹⁰ The road beside Kenny’s house and the title of the street in the series invite a viewer to imagine finding the spot again. Rainisto invites a related question. How much of what makes a photograph feel like a record of a particular place comes from the way the picture has been made?

Felipe Posada’s The Waveform Virtuoso reached the wallet on the same day as Kenny’s observation.¹¹ Posada fills a room where Kenny clears a landscape. A figure sits at a keyboard surrounded by instruments, equipment and greenery.¹¹ Light falls into a space so full of things that the musician almost becomes one more shape for the eye to pick out. The token places it in Posada’s String Theory series.¹¹ Music enters its BrainDrops holdings in a more literal way through Fake Feelings by Dadabots and Silverstein. The artists trained a neural audio system on Silverstein’s music. Its voices can suggest the emotional force of a song even though the vocal sounds are syllables without lyrics.¹² One of the DAO’s editions, Copycat Dolefulness, carries the tempo Fast and the style Loud in its own metadata.¹³ A title that suggests melancholy sits beside instructions that describe something much more forceful.

The collecting address is public. The DAO names cyborgdao.eth on its site, and the ENS name resolved back to the audited address at the snapshot block.³ The separate consolidation record lists that address alone.¹⁴ The October BrainDrops register gives weight to edition size and the time works have been held.¹⁵ On the contract itself, the wallet held releases as different as Claire Silver’s Genesis, Entangled Others’ Chimerical Stories and Infiniteyay’s New Realities.⁹ Silver arranged raw AI images into a narrative.¹⁶ Entangled Others began with the familiar sequence of caterpillar, chrysalis and butterfly, then turned towards changes in other organisms for which most viewers have no ready image.¹⁷ Infiniteyay asked what kinds of imagined worlds might emerge from the meeting of human desires and a shared visual history.¹⁸ Each offers a different starting point for a viewer. In the DAO’s own public account of looking at Botto, the encounter begins on a smaller scale, with the moment a single face starts to disappear.⁴