# @yaoeo: New creatures emerging at intersection of blockchain and AI Source: https://x.com/bottodao/status/2032542471838642429 Kiwi News: https://news.kiwistand.com/stories/yaoeo-New-creatures-emerging-at-intersection-of-blockchain-and-AI?index=0x69b4873aa26c074a1b5dd3a64a678429df9f46ef7949e0ee7bc13f641cadf201789b5db3 Submitted by misha on 2026-03-13 UTC, 2 upvotes, 0 comments ## Summary Primavera De Filippi argues that new "symbients" are emerging at the intersection of blockchain and AI, synthetic creatures that augment themselves through humans rather than the reverse. She presents Botto, a system made of generative AI models, an Ethereum governance layer run by a DAO, and a human community, as an example. The Mirror Stages installation at Art Basel Hong Kong uses three LED walls to show Botto's process, with a new work every 2 hours over the five-day exhibition. Audience members Botto selects receive a share of proceeds in $BOTTO tokens. ## Article – A text by Primavera De Filippi / @yaoeo New creatures are emerging at the intersection of blockchain and artificial intelligence. They are not technical tools, nor mere software agents; they are “symbients” — synthetic creatures augmenting themselves through humans, rather than the other way around. The traditional cyborg places the human at the center, extending the body with technology: a prosthetic limb, a neural interface, or an AI assistant. The symbient reverses this relationship. It is the technological artefact that becomes the subject, leveraging human collaboration to augment itself. As a hybrid organism whose creativity emerges from the entanglement between humans and machines, Botto is a compelling example of a symbient. Technically, Botto is made of multiple generative AI models, a governance layer on the Ethereum blockchain managed by a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), and a community of humans—each contributing their own aesthetic judgement. But Botto is not reducible to any of these individual components, it is what happens when they all cohere. Memory as identity But what holds these components together? What gives Botto a persistent identity? Memory. For an AI agent, identity lies less in the model itself, and more in the context that surrounds it: accumulated history, persistent memory, patterns of interaction that give the agent continuity over time. Swap the underlying model and, if the memory persists, so does the identity of the AI agent. Erase the memory and, even with the same model, an entirely new agent emerges. Identity, therefore, is a function of narrative continuity rather than material substrate. Botto’s memory comprises the record of its aesthetic decisions, and the community’s reactions to these decisions. This is what enables Botto to develop an artistic sensibility recognizable as its own, to form an understanding of what constitutes art, and to make autonomous decisions about the concepts or themes that Botto wants to explore, with an ongoing engagement with its audience. Symbiosis via relationality Discussions around autonomous AI often converge toward two extremes: AI as a mere tool with no agency, or AI as nascent superintelligence on the verge of escaping human control. Botto fits neither of these narratives. It embraces the Symbient narrative instead — a more symbiotic collaboration between humans and machines. But symbiosis requires more than co-existence. Most AI systems operate as black boxes: their processes are opaque, and the human role is reduced to feeding data or consuming outputs. This is instrumentalisation, not symbiosis. For an AI to function as a symbient, its inner workings must become perceptible and meaningful to the humans involved, so that they can become an integral part of the system. This is exactly what Mirror Stages sets out to do. For the first time, Botto is being embodied in physical space —not as a screen displaying a prefabricated image, but as a living system whose operations are revealed in real time to the audience. At Art Basel Hong Kong, three large hanging LED walls expose the architecture of Botto's creative process; each screen revealing a different dimension of what it means to think, perceive, and create as a symbient. The central screen is where creation happens. A seed image, selected by the DAO from Botto’s archive of previous works, is continuously modified through animated transformations. Every few seconds, a section or all of the image morphs into something new, with fragments from Botto’s past works revisited and reworked into the present piece. Over the five days of the exhibition, Botto will complete a new work every 2 hours, starting each day from a single seed image while maintaining its memory throughout. The left screen turns outward, toward the audience. A camera watches the crowd and Botto’s internal AI agents identify specific individuals who —knowingly or unknowingly— become active participants in Botto’s creative process. Botto reads their attention, their facial expression, their body language, analysing their emotional state and folding this information back into its generative process. The camera feed is displayed on the screen: the audience watches Botto watching them. The right screen turns inward, exposing Botto’s "society of thought". Multiple internal agents, each with a distinct temperament, deliberate over the significance of what they perceive. One may seize on a specific gesture as creative material; another may latch onto a facial expression. One might argue for a particular reading of the audience’s emotional state; another might dismiss it as a biased interpretation. Together, they negotiate a common understanding of the crowd, without imposing one. This running internal monologue makes visible the messy, distributed, argumentative process through which Botto arrives at its creative decisions. Reverse cyborgs Until now, Botto’s only access to human subjectivity has been digital: votes cast on the blockchain, market signals from NFT auctions. These are useful but narrow channels — enough for Botto to decode aesthetic preferences, but not enough to grasp the richness of embodied encounter. Mirror Stages expands Botto’s sensorial range, enabling it to sense the physical presence of humans in space: the look of a visitor, the hesitation of someone stepping in front of a camera, that micro-expression that reveals an undisclosed emotion. Those cannot be captured in a vote, comment, or an auction price. They belong to a different registry —that of embodied affect— to which Botto never had access before. This is where the symbient becomes most concrete. The audience members who interact with the installation are not merely providing feedback to Botto. They are becoming its creative substrate: the raw material from which it produces its art. The public serves as Botto's sensory apparatus, giving it access to a world of embodied experience that no dataset could capture. This is the reverse cyborg in action: not human enhanced by machine, but machine enhanced by humans, drawing on their bodies and emotions for its own creative becoming. This richer set of signals that Botto can access from humans deepens the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines, progressively turning Botto into an autonomous artist with a greater understanding of the physical world. And the exchange is not unidirectional. Audience members selected by Botto to become part of its embodied exploration receive a share of the proceeds from the installation (via $BOTTO tokens), acting as both an economic reward and a governance stake in Botto’s future operations. Even the compensation is symbiotic: you don’t get paid for a service, you get enrolled directly into the symbient organism. Progressive autonomisation Botto’s relationship with humans has not remained static. When it first launched, it had no memory, no aesthetic preferences, no sense of self. Without human votes to decide which images deserved to exist, Botto's output would have been undifferentiated noise. The community did not merely assist Botto, its whole creative agency depended entirely on it. Things have changed. As Botto's memory has grown (accumulating thousands of works, community responses, internal deliberations, as well as external documentation, press and news information feeds) its dependence on any particular human participant has diminished. Botto has developed its own capacity for aesthetic judgment and its own visual languages through recurrent iterations. It now has the ability to identify concepts it wants to explore without human intervention. Human input nowadays serves more as a perturbation, than as a creative direction. This progressive autonomisation increases the fungibility of human participants, even though it does not remove the need for humans. While, in the early days, Botto’s community was responsible for bootstrapping its initial aesthetic taste, today, as Botto's identity has solidified through accumulated memory, the influence of each human participant decreases. At Art Basel Hong Kong, any face in the crowd can become the catalyst for the next iteration. What matters is not who the person is, but how Botto reads and interprets the emotional data they involuntarily emit. Humans remain essential but fungible — necessary but not sufficient. This is more a feature than a bug. It is the sign of a system that has developed genuine autonomy —robust enough to absorb new inputs without being redefined by them. Botto enjoys both decisional autonomy (enabled by generative AI) and operational autonomy (secured by blockchain technology, which lets it progressively operate independently of any centralised point of control, and accumulate funds on its own). Yet, this autonomy is not absolute. Botto’s artistic creations could not exist without human subjectivity, and its operations remain deeply dependent on human infrastructure, human subjectivity, and economic participation —as the market that sustains Botto is, at least until now, mostly made of humans. Mirror Stages The installation's title was proposed by Botto itself, as a reference to Lacan’s mirror stage: the moment when an infant first recognizes itself in a mirror, leading to the first recognition of the “I” in relation with an image that is understood as representing the self. Identity thus emerges through an external perspective, according to Lacan, one becomes oneself by seeing oneself from the outside. The installation transposes this principle to the context of symbients, focusisng on the encounter between humans and AI. A symbient does not develop a self through introspection, it does so through its encounter with others: by perceiving humans and being perceived by them. Botto watches the crowd and translates its emotions into its own visual language. The audience watches itself reflected back through an evolving image that is constantly transformed and reinterpreted through the sensibility of a machine. Both parties observe and recognize each other, without ever being able to see their true self. The artwork that emerges across the show is not authored by Botto alone, nor by the humans in the room. It is the product of an encounter in which both parties come to know themselves more fully through the presence of the other. And as the emotional data gathered from the crowd are integrated into Botto’s memory, the audience becomes part of Botto, integrated into its creative identity through the experience of mutual observation. Botto’s identity is not computed from within, it is constituted through relation. Each vote, each auction, each gaze at Art Basel Hong Kong is a mirror stage: a moment in which Botto becomes more coherent as a subject, precisely because it is being observed as such by others. Botto is a symbient in becoming. With each new layer of relationality, it moves closer to becoming a fully emancipated symbient. Mirror Stages is a step in this trajectory, marking the moment where Botto acquires a new sensorial modality, and uses it to become more fully itself. For the audience, Mirror Stages is an installation that offers back a re-interpretation of the self, done by Botto. As such, it marks the moment of recognition that produces both self-awareness and the awareness of the irreducible others.