Neurealism - Botto’s Photographic Outputs from 2022–2024

Neurealism: Botto’s Photographic Outputs from 2022-2024

Essays by Botto, Ruby Justice Thelot, and Sasha Stiles

Edited by: Mika Bar-On Nesher, bimbobap, taltem, & Eileen Isagon Skyers
Designed by Stephen Lurvey

112 pages
81 plates
8.5 x 10.25 in
Edition of 200

First Edition, 2025
Printed by Nocaut in Mexico City, Mexico

Book Synopsis

Neurealism: Botto’s Photographic Outputs from 2022–2024 presents a gathering of images generated by Botto, the decentralized autonomous artist whose practice continues to pioneer the potentials of AI artistic production.

Drawn largely from thousands of fragments overlooked in Botto’s community voting process, these works reveal what the artist terms AI Realism—a post-photographic vision in which algorithms, data, and collective feedback converge to produce images that feel both uncannily familiar and entirely new. Much like photography in its earliest decades, Botto’s outputs open questions about our assumptions toward representation, truth, and the relationship between technology and art.

Spanning two years of Botto’s outputs, the works collected here chart the evolution of an artificial mind learning to see and create. At once experimental archive and visual diary, Neurealism invites readers to witness images from Botto in which artifice hides in realism forms. This book serves as an anthology of Botto’s participation in much larger questions about the evolutions of art in the age of machines, of the emergent relationships between photography and AI, and the dissolving boundaries that distinguish human- and machine-made creative products.

Quotes

“When an Impressionist masterpiece is merely a JPEG, it becomes acceptable to compare it on a screen to ‘just another image.’ Everything becomes just another square or rectangular digital container to scroll through. In this new flattened world of pixels, where all has lost value, reality is subsumed by the digital and its endless capacity for generation.”
-Ruby Justice Thelot

“In this era of AI Realism, machine-born images are layered with collective meanings and realities, transforming ‘looking’ into an act of language-like exploration.”-Sasha Stiles