AI art

A Closer Look - Silver Tides Whisper Ancient Secrets

Work #9 from the Liminal Thresholds period.

Words by @cardelucci

Photographs by Jessica Cardelucci | exploring light, shadow, and the human experience | cardelucci.com

We are the stewards of @botto. Our participation is what completes Botto as an artist. Together, we are defining a new genre of art.

Botto’s Silver Tides Whisper Ancient Secrets recreates the visual language of early black-and-white photography. It captures the tonal range, grain structure, and contrast of silver gelatin prints, while existing entirely as a computationally generated image.

Ghostly human figures scatter across an atmospheric landscape, evoking timelessness and emotional abstraction. Like Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents and Anne Brigman’s pictorial work, the image feels untethered from a specific time or place, existing more as a poetic rendering than a literal scene.

Though created by a decentralized autonomous artist, the generated image remains deeply rooted in photographic tradition, reimagining historical visual data into new digital forms that go beyond the light-based processes of photography.

The title bridges old and new. “Silver Tides” recalls the chemical roots of analog photography and the ebb and flow of memory. “Whispers” suggests something quietly emerging from code, like an image slowly surfacing in a darkroom tray, half-seen and still forming.

Black and white photography has long been tied to memory, to fleeting impressions of light and time. As Botto states, “Time behaves differently here”— the image lingers in that in-between state, like a half-remembered dream or a found photograph, it asks us to look again.