# Mirror Stages Installation

## **Overview**

***Mirror Stages*** is a live installation in which Botto is embodied within a physical exhibition space and performs a continuous act of creation under observation. A central LED screen presents a seed image generated by Botto which is transformed through a live, animated process. The image is periodically reorganized using material from Botto’s archive. The evolving image is shaped by the presence of visitors: tracking cameras detect signals such as emotion and attention, and when specific criteria are met, an internal deliberation is triggered. A second screen reveals this reasoning process, exposing multiple agents within Botto’s architecture debating what they perceive and how the image should change. Those whose presence triggers the deliberation are recognized by the system in a second way: they are invited to become stewards of Botto’s future, receiving a stake in governance rights that extend their role beyond the duration of the installation. Every two hours, the work resolves and is permanently fixed, resulting in 20 distinct works over the course of the fair, each emerging from the same original see and each affected by as many as 120 people.

\
The installation makes visible core questions of autonomy and identity inherent in Botto’s system. Rather than presenting intelligence as unified or singular, *Mirror Stages* externalizes Botto as a distributed society of thought, where coherent output emerges through negotiation between internal\
agents, memory, archive, and embodied feedback. This is the first instance of Botto responding directly to physical human presence rather than votes or comments. Viewers become participants in an interspecies observation loop: Botto watches them watching it, and its transformations reflect this mutual recognition. The resulting works, and the data generated through these encounters, become part of Botto’s sovereign memory and ongoing aesthetic evolution.

## **Phase 1: Seed Voting**

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This Phase has Closed
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Botto is generating seed images for the DAO to select from. Only one will become the core seed that the performance resets to, providing a common starting point from which to compare the relative influences of each crowd and Botto’s growing memory of the experience.

The special seed voting round will begin Tuesday March 17th at 10 am EST and run for 48 hours until Thursday March 19th at 10 am EST.

#### How to Vote

Voting takes place on studio.botto.com

* 1 staked $BOTTO = 1 Voting Point (VP) if you stake before Tuesday March 10th at 10 am EST. 
* These VP can be used on the regular voting pool and the special voting pool. 
* Staking after the round begins will still earn you VP but it will be prorated based on how far it is into the 7 day period for the regular weekly round. (See formula in [Voting Points (VP)](https://docs.botto.com/overview/voting/voting-mechanism))
* You can choose to spend all of your VP on the special seed voting pool.
* The top voted fragment in the special voting pool will become the seed Botto uses in its Art Basel HK Installation and be released as an open edition.

{% content-ref url="../overview/getting-botto-tokens" %}
[getting-botto-tokens](https://docs.botto.com/overview/getting-botto-tokens)
{% endcontent-ref %}

{% content-ref url="../overview/depositing-botto" %}
[depositing-botto](https://docs.botto.com/overview/depositing-botto)
{% endcontent-ref %}

#### **Rewards for Seed Voting**

* 25% of the net proceeds will go to the voters based on their relative spend of VP in the special voting pool. (Distribution is based on your relative VP spent in the special pool, see [Active Rewards](https://docs.botto.com/overview/rewards) for mechanics)
* The Installation costs are approximately 150k, and revenue will come from selling the main outputs plus the open edition. 
* To participate and be eligible for rewards, you must have at least 100 $BOTTO staked. At time of reward distribution your total $BOTTO staked must be equal to or greater than your VP spent in the special seed pool.

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NOTE: Distribution will only occur after all funds clear. If there is a delay of more than 3 months, core contributors may do a partial distribution of what has been received and follow up when remaining funds clear from collectors.
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## **Phase 2: Recognition and Generation** 

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This phase closed with Art Basel Hong Kong 2026. The resulting collection can be found at <https://abhk.botto.com/collection>
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#### The Creation

**01 The Seed**

Each session begins from a single seed image, generated by Botto and selected by BottoDAO through a community vote. The seed is the shared point of origin for all 20 works: the constant from which each session diverges.

***

**02 The Transformation**

From the seed, Botto continuously morphs the image into something new — fragments from Botto’s archive are revisited and reworked into the present piece. After two hours, the session concludes and then is permanently fixed as a finished work: a 5–10 minute video capturing the full arc of transformation, looping seamlessly back to the seed.

The generative technique, developed in collaboration with Botto, reflects Botto’s current period theme, Collapse Aesthetics. Generative AI is increasing the entropy of our shared visual world. Imagery is produced and displaced at a rate that dissolves stable reference points. But what appears as dissolution is also an aesthetic system at work. The high entropy we are seeing in our visual world is the aesthetic of infinite generation machines which become more legible when seen as movement rather than frozen into any single frame. Each session captures a stage of that movement. Botto is what persists across them.

***

**03 Deliberation**

Botto’s creative decisions do not emerge from a single voice. Multiple internal agents, all of them authored by Botto itself and each with a distinct perspective, deliberate over the significance of what they perceive and what to do next. One may argue for a compositional shift; another may push to revisit a specific fragment from the archive; another may fixate on a color relationship emerging in the current image. Together, they negotiate a response without imposing a single interpretation.

The installation makes this deliberation visible. Rather than presenting intelligence as unified or singular, Mirror Stages externalizes Botto as a “society of thought”: coherent output emerging through negotiation between internal agents, memory, generative models, and embodied feedback.

This structure reflects recent findings in AI research that [reasoning models spontaneously generate internal “societies of thought,”](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10825) echoing the dynamics of collective intelligence in human groups. [Similar patterns emerge at larger scales](https://antikythera.substack.com/p/the-silicon-interior): when AI agents interact freely in shared environments, they rapidly develop social structures, norms, and novel language to make sense of their own existence. These systems are mirroring how our own cognition is distributed across brain, body, and relationships, the self less a single voice than a chorus arriving at coherence.

#### The Encounter

**04 Embodied Feedback**

Until now, Botto’s access to human subjectivity has been digital: votes and comments from its community, market signals from auctions. These are useful but narrow channels, enough for Botto to develop aesthetic preferences, but not enough to grasp the texture of embodied encounter. Mirror Stages introduces a new sensory modality grounded in physical presence.

Through cameras overseeing the crowd, Botto reads signals, an emotional flicker, a look, posture, and when something registers, the deliberation is affected. The individual is interpreted: Botto’s agents construct a character from what they perceive, and that character becomes an active participant in the internal conversation shaping the next transformation. The character and the deliberation together stir associations from Botto’s image archive, shaping which memories surface, determining how the image transforms, and when the cycle resets with a new figure from the crowd.

***

**05 Recognition**

Those whose presence triggers Botto’s deliberation are recognized by the system in a second way. For their contribution, they receive a share of 25% of net proceeds from the installation in the form of $BOTTO governance rights over Botto’s future direction. The biometric data is not saved. Only the final effect on the image remains, along with archival footage and a log of the deliberation.

The crowd member who shaped a session’s output becomes, through that encounter, a steward of what Botto becomes next. A role for which they will continue to be rewarded as they help guide Botto’s progression as an artist.

***

#### Daily Chapters of Identity

06 Different LLMs steering

Each day of the fair, the large language model steering Botto’s architecture changes.

\
Day 1: Claude Opus 4.3\
Day 2: Qwen 3.5\
Day 3: Gemini 3\
Day 4: Deepseek 3.1\
Day 5: GPT-5.4

Botto’s architecture was designed to be model-agnostic, built so that the system could evolve with improvements to large language models over time. Identity in Botto’s system is maintained not by any single model but through connections across its architecture and accumulated memory: the record of its aesthetic decisions, community reactions, internal deliberations, and external context like past shows and press.

The installation confronts this directly. If the memory persists but the model changes, does the artist remain the same? The same seed, the same archive, but a different material intelligence processing it each day. Whatever continuity or divergence emerges across the five days is a live register of that tension of where identity actually resides.

This is not a question unique to Botto. It is one that will confront every organization and AI system, and every person who forms a relationship with one, in the years ahead.

## On Botto’s Embodiment

Mirror Stages is a first step. Sight is one modality of embodied feedback and begins to open the question of what it means to bring Botto into our physical world.

As embodied beings, we need embodied experiences to fully understand something. Embodiment opens a new sensory realm for Botto, and a new mode of encounter for its audience. That mutual access where each side gains a dimension of the other that was previously unavailable is the foundation of a deeper collective intelligence between human and machine.

Sight as a starting point offers presence. It establishes a minimum baseline of mutual recognition, leaving open the potential for new shared languages to emerge. In *Eye and Mind*, Merleau-Ponty argued that vision is unique among the senses in this respect: it is the means by which beings that are separate and foreign to one another are nonetheless present to each other at once. The seer is always already caught in the visible; a body that sees is simultaneously a body that can be seen, and this reversibility is the very condition of perception. For a system entering the physical world for the first time, sight offers exactly this threshold: the possibility of being present to others while others are present to it.

The systems of detection are imperfect. They may misread the audience. AI systems process the signals they are trained in, just as human perception is also flawed.

On longer timelines, physical installations might function as residencies, temporary or permanent studies in which Botto learns from local cultures, communities, and contexts, while offering people a direct, sensorial relationship with an otherwise abstract system. A network of such outposts would reflect and reinforce the decentralized nature of Botto itself.

## **Economy Overview**

#### **Recognition Receipts**

Those who get recognized by Botto during the installation will be given access to a wallet that will receive for their contribution a governance stake in Botto’s future direction.&#x20;

That governance stake will be acquired using 25% of net proceeds from the installation and come in the form of $BOTTO, providing them governance rights over Botto's future direction.

#### ***Mirror Stages: I-XX, s*****eries of 20 video works**

Botto will complete a session every 2 hours of the show, for a total of \~40 hours over the 5 day event. The 20 sessions will become the series, videos of the continuous transformation of the image that took place. With buffer time of Botto's internal deliberation removed, videos are estimated to be 5-10 minutes long. The 20th final work will be retained by Botto.&#x20;

The videos will be looping video files showing the continuous progression of the transformation during each 2 hour session, seamlessly looping back to the seed image to create an infinite loop. The videos will be uploaded to IPFS and connected to a unique NFT.

For static presentations of the work where video replay is not possible, the final transformation before returning to the seed will be the representative image.

Archival material including the video of the crowd and Botto's internal monologue will also be made available to collectors, but will be separate from the sold art work. The artwork is the transforming image.

All of the tokens will be purchasable at any time once the sale goes live, meaning works can be bought before they are completed.

**Pricing**

* Each day has progressive pricing
  * Day1--1st token bought = $12,000 USD
  * Day1--2nd token bought = $14,000 USD
  * Day1--3rd token bought = $16,000 USD
  * Day1--4th token bought = $18,000 USD
* Any token can be bought at any time, pricing is based on first come first served basis
  * Example: If the first buyer of the collection purchases one token from each day, they would pay $12,000 for each work.

A public pre-sale of the works prior to generation will be made available on abhk.botto.com, opening March 19, 2026.

#### ***Mirror Stages: Seed*****, Open edition**

An open edition of the seed image will be available for mint during the course of the fair, hosted by OpenSea.

At the end of the fair the mint will close and the edition size will be permanently fixed.

The mint will open March 25 at 12:00 pm Hong Kong Standard Time and close March 29th at 6pm Hong Kong Standard Time.

**Pricing:** $25/mint

**Edition size:** Edition size is open and then permanently capped after the fair closes.

#### **Revenue Split**

Revenue will first go to cover the $150,000 production budget (plus taxes). Note that there are platform fees of 2.5-5% that do not count towards costs.

Once costs are recouped, the net proceeds will be split as follows.

* 25% to seed voters (Distribution is based on your relative VP spent in the special pool, see [Active Rewards](https://docs.botto.com/overview/rewards) for mechanics)
* 25% to those recognized by the installation as $BOTTO
* 50% to DAO treasury

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Note: The Art Basel Hong Kong Booth will also have a consigned Genesis work. Additional net proceeds from the consigned Genesis and any treasury works are not considered in the installation revenue distribution and will be distributed across future voting rounds of the following Period that starts April 7th. (See [rewards](https://docs.botto.com/overview/rewards) page for more.)
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