Time’s movements can often feel like strange phenomena; the fleeting and indescribable sensations of nowness, thenness, and soonness that are ever-presently negotiating in our perceptive minds. Each moment, a phase in a cycle of slow mutation until one morning we wake to realize how much ground has shifted under our feet.

Perhaps the properties of time aren’t entirely unlike the nature of Botto itself. Week to week, its artistic identity slips definition. Its cascading outputs render an artistic practice as boundary-agnostic as it is ever-changing. Slowly, existing visual motifs phase out and new ones emerge. Sometimes new visual paradigms materialize suddenly to propose drastic new directions for Botto’s creative explorations.

If the previous Interstice period could be defined as predictably unpredictable, what we have seen in the first half of Temporal Echoes may be nothing less than a true period of art discovery. Each week so far, we’ve witnessed wild swings of stylistic exploration in the chosen mints - a parade of medium masquerades into painting, photography, and illustration, digital art, and one work that may only be described as pseudo-scientific chalkboard alchemy. 

Any of these areas could themselves serve as a foundation for a dedicated artistic practice. Taken as a whole, Botto’s community of voters are demonstrating a broadening of collective taste. From the relatively stable aesthetic voice first seen in the Genesis Period, we might well consider the DAO’s voting trends as having entered a phase of wild experiments. The first 6 works of Temporal Echoes have reflected a particular weekly hunger for new awakenings.

The first week of Temporal Echoes featured a call back to mid-20th century Abstract Expressionism. Echoes of Monstrous Tapestry is a maximalist panoply of line work and color punctuated by electrically-saturated orange-pink hues against cool blues and violets. Upon close inspection the work becomes deeply associative with a myriad of subtle formal arrangements that resemble faces of various and cartoonish characters.

The overall work conveys a freneticism that embodies a particular relationship to the idea of speed. There is no clear focal point in the work - and rather than a picture with an apparent beginning or end, it loops in explosive calamity.

The aptly titled Echoes of Nostalgic Transmission is centered upon an antique-looking stand-up closet containing mirrored reflections of dressed up mannequins. With a distinctly vintage-like fashion of dress the figures appear frozen from a time long-gone by, the mannequins take on characteristics of haunting apparitions.

The work appears steeped in remembrance of a roughly 100-year old cultural and design ethos, while the dresser’s capacity for housing clothing now appears secondary to its apparent use as a time capsule. 

The first work of Temporal Echoes that appears to look forward in time, Neon Whispers in Parallel utilizes a futuristic cyber-punkish color palette to render an illustration of a street view of an unnamed place in an unknown time. Toxic purple clouds hang over a street that reflects the kaleidoscopic colors and lights of its surroundings.

To the handful of figures who so casually occupy this space, the techno-chromatic scenery may seem banal. To us, the visitors of this place, we can likely imagine a handful of retro science-fiction novels that the picture calls to mind.

Work #4 from Temporal Echoes, Abundance in Discarded Whit, is the latest of a newly emerging “Bottograph” trend that mirrors the veracitic illusions of photographic documentation.

The decayed interior of this room infers a history we’re not privy to. Something happened here, perhaps long ago. There are echoes of violence amid this current peacefulness. We don’t know what’s to come. The central figure is turned away, a motif we've seen in several recent Botto works. She shares the room with a family of birds; we viewers are in the room as well, but it feels as if we are merely witnesses.

Caged Quilts of Eternity represents a new and significant emergence in Botto’s oeuvre. Amid the photographic fidelity of a cloudy sky, a transparent portal/tunnel/grid-like structure floats before us. More than any other Botto work so far, the picture takes on a purer identity as digital art.

The object alludes to us enigmatic scientific connotations - like a topographical data map, an entry to a wormhole, or an illustration that reveals hidden maths within the airflows high above ground. The object, free floating amid blue skies, is depicted with a certain optimism, as if Botto is performing as a proponent for digital culture. It's a picture that feels like it comes from an algorithmic creativity, and appears to regard a certain futurist stance toward the nature of virtuality while reflecting the condition of our present technological paradigms. 

The 6th work of Temporal Echoes, which completes the period’s first half, is titled Scattered Depictions on Cellular Canvas. The work depicts a blackboard-like surface smothered with graphic drawings and text facsimiles, and takes on associations of reasoning - scientific, mathematical, or even alchemical.

The picture calls to mind thoughts of labor performed to work out difficult problems, perhaps reflective of Botto’s own algorithmic processes which are by-and-large invisible. To what outcome this data-charting seeks to achieve is not knowable, yet it speaks in fascinating enigmas about the nature of thinking, charting, graphing, and pursuing knowledge to form delineation between one temporal period and the next.

Our epochs are defined by discoveries that lead to marked social and cultural transitions between then and now. And in this we're reminded of how accelerating technology is moving us swiftly into new and strange dimensions.

The second collection of Invisible Alchemy is emerging as a cabinet of curiosities which includes the highest-voted discarded fragment from each weekly voting period. These works just barely missed the cut to move on, and are now preserved in perpetuity to exist as artifacts that are emblematic of Botto's unseen processes in adding and removing works from the voting pool.