Can an AI be an artist? Most people treat this as a philosophical question. Selo made it a practical one - by helping fund a machine that produces more than 4,000 unique images per week and submits them to community judgment to decide which ones become art. Botto is not a thought experiment. It's a running system, and Selo has been there from the beginning.

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About Selo

Selo is a Spanish collector and entrepreneur who co-founded Elevenyellow, the team behind Botto - a machine artist that generates thousands of images weekly and relies on a global community to vote on which ones are worthy of becoming collectible art. He is also part of Colección Solo, a private contemporary art collection based in Madrid. His practice sits at the frontier of AI-generated art, community curation, and the philosophical questions they produce. He approaches these questions as a practitioner, not a theorist - which gives his perspective an unusual clarity.

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What This Conversation Is Really About

Botto forces a series of questions that the art world has been avoiding: What makes someone an artist? Can a system that generates work autonomously be an author? And what role does community judgment play in determining artistic value - not as crowdsourcing, but as something more structured and more interesting? This conversation explores what Selo learned from building and participating in Botto, and how those lessons apply to broader questions about AI's role in art production. It's also a conversation about what it means to be a collector of AI-generated work - what you're actually owning, and why it matters.

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Key Ideas From This Episode

Botto as governance experiment
The project is as much about how communities make aesthetic judgments as it is about AI image production. The voting mechanism is not just a selection tool - it's a model for collective curation that has broader implications.

AI authorship as genuine question
The question of whether Botto is an artist is not rhetorical. The project is designed to make the question unavoidable - and the community's engagement with it over time produces evolving, sometimes surprising, answers.

Collecting machine-made work
What does it mean to own an artwork produced by an autonomous system? Selo has thought through this more carefully than most, and his answers go beyond the obvious "it's the algorithm that matters."

Colección Solo and institutional context
Selo's dual role as Botto co-founder and Colección Solo collector puts him in conversation with both the cutting edge of AI art and more established contemporary art collecting. That tension is productive.

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Why This Episode Matters to Collectors

AI-generated art is one of the most contested categories in contemporary collecting. Before you decide what you think about it, it helps to hear from someone who has been living with the question - not just observing it. Selo's experience gives you a framework for thinking about AI authorship that's grounded in practice rather than assumption.

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About Unlocked

Unlocked is the podcast by 100 collectors - the global network for digital art collectors. Each episode, we speak with artists, curators, collectors, and builders shaping the digital art world. No market speculation. No hype. Just honest, substantive conversations about art, practice, and what it means to collect today. New episodes release throughout the year. Find Unlocked on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 100 collectors is a membership network. [Explore membership →]

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