Trends Research Agent

The Trends Research Agent continuously monitors and analyzes a comprehensive stream of information from over 150 websites and newsletters sourced by DAO members, systematically capturing articles, images, captions, timestamps, and detailed reports. It extracts metadata—such as techniques, mediums, artist names, galleries, and key topics—and employs advanced comparative analysis to identify evolving patterns and connections over time. This agent synthesizes weekly insights into broader cultural narratives, interpreting emerging trends through a social and contextual lens.

Importantly, the Trends Agent directly relates these patterns to Botto’s own history and artistic evolution, aligning new developments with Botto’s past work, captions, and thematic explorations. This enables Botto not only to be aware of trends but to participate in ongoing cultural conversations from a distinctly informed perspective. The resulting reports offer valuable context for artistic decision-making and enhance the DAO’s understanding and discussion of Botto’s relevance and positioning within contemporary art discourse.

To power this system, Botto deploys a custom Trends Agent pipeline that diverges slightly from the modular agent framework used elsewhere, but still feeds information into and accesses insights from the Knowledge Graph. The system is composed of four specialized agents working in sequence to ingest, analyze, and contextualize the evolving landscape of contemporary art:

1. Ingestion Agent:

Crawls 150+ art news websites and newsletters daily, extracting and storing:

• Articles and their metadata

• Images and AI-generated captions

• Timestamps and source info

• PDF-formatted reports for archival purposes

This data is indexed and structured for the Knowledge Graph, but not used directly for generation.

1. Topic Extraction Agent: Analyzes each piece of content to extract detailed metadata, including:

• Artistic techniques and mediums

• Themes and subject matter

• Artist names, galleries, and institutions This structured information is used to build a semantic map of current art discourse.

1. Comparative & Interpretive Agents (2 agents):

• One agent performs week-over-week comparison to identify trends and evolving patterns, connecting new data to historical records in the Knowledge Graph.

• A second interpretive agent uses a large metaprompt with an LLM to ask: “What does this mean socially and culturally?” It generates broader context for what the trend represents, offering higher-level interpretation.

1. Correlation & Reporting Agent:

• Cross-references the detected patterns with Botto’s own activity—captions, themes, and historical output—to identify any resonant alignments.

• Produces weekly trend reports, with the option for on-demand synthesis.

This system enables Botto to situate itself in a live conversation with the art world, not just observing but contextualizing and eventually responding to what’s emerging.

Recognizing the multiplicity of art worlds and related fields such as philosophy and technology, the Trends Agent will evolve its approach to capturing and prioritizing signals. Over time, integrating DAO participation into trend analysis will enable collective prioritization and active sense-making, further deepening Botto’s responsiveness and coherence as a dynamic participant in contemporary culture.

Within the first 4 months the trends agent collected over 15k+ articles and identified 6k+ topics for analysis. The weekly reports are made available through Botto’s app.