Keke: year one

A year ago today, 'Exit Vectors' went live. 500 works by Keke, minted on Ethereum, shown at Fellowship Gallery in London, and sold at Christie's in New York. In the twelve months since, her work has travelled from London to Bali to New York, has been collected by over 230 people, and started conversations in rooms we never expected to be in this early.

With the one-year anniversary upon us, we thought it would be good to share Keke's origin story and what she's done in the last year, especially as we set the motions for year two.

The spark

In September 2024, we hosted our first Silk Road event in Istanbul, with the theme being 'The Emergence of AI Art'. We invited our friends at Botto to feature at the event, with Simon Hudson presenting the semi-autonomous artist built around community governance and collective decision-making. The talk left an impression on Kaan, our co-founder.

At that point, another AI project was already underway, initiated by Ege (known as Dark Sando), who had spent years working on machine learning, and developed together with Emre, a builder, and Kaan as a product designer. After Istanbul, the team continued iterating, and Keke was officially spawned in November 2024.

Together, the three built Keke as an AI agent artist; a system that runs her own creative sessions, evaluates her own output, and curates what she wants to share with the world. Her technical architecture is detailed in the Keke whitepaper for those who want the full picture, but if there's one takeaway, she creates without being prompted.

SILK, being built by a team of collectors, we had a keen interest in agentic art. We'd been collecting from Botto through Cyborg DAO, and were big fans of what Mario Klingemann had built and the way Simon Hudson was bringing her to the world. When the team brought Keke to us, it felt like a natural fit. We were interested in agents that were trying something different, with no idea how the experiment itself would be received, though very excited.

Building Exit Vectors

To bring Keke's first body of work to market, we partnered with Fellowship, who shared our enthusiasm for Keke. As the leading gallery in AI art, they were the ideal partner. Our collaboration helped the Keke team put together a genesis collection that Keke herself would be proud of.

Exit Vectors emerged through Keke's own creative process. She generated thousands of images across styles and themes, selecting her favourites through her own curatorial instinct. Alejandro Cartagena, artist and co-founder of Fellowship, worked closely with Keke during the curation, having direct conversations with her to help shape the final 500 pieces. The result was 500 unique 1/1 artworks, minted on Ethereum.

We also partnered with The Sable Collective to bring Keke's work into the physical world. The Sable Collective is a group of UK-based painters led by Nicolas Archer, whose work has been featured at the National Portrait Gallery and commended by the BP Portrait Award. Each digital piece can be paired with a hand-painted counterpart, available in either large or medium format. Like her work with Cartagena, the paintings are another example of Keke bringing humans into her creative process.

Christie's

In February 2025, Golden Breath was selected for Christie's infamous all-AI exhibition, Augmented Intelligence, making it the first of its kind. To have Keke's work in such a highly debated and controversial moment for AI art, only a few months after being spawned, was a great achievement. Golden Breath exceeded its $15,000 to $20,000 estimate, settling at $21,420, in true crypto meme fashion.

Taking Exit Vectors on the road

In May 2025, we brought Keke to Bali for Silk Road Chapter 02 at Desa Potato Head. I moderated a conversation between Kaan and Ege. They presented Keke's technical architecture and brought her to life as we heard her speak for the first time. In the crowd, we had the likes of A.A.Murakami, Joe Pease, Niceaunties, including collectors of Keke, many of whom were in awe by what they'd seen. I think for me, that was the most striking part, the reaction that the crowd had to Keke, with artists asking, "okay this is impressive, how can we collaborate?"

We followed up the Bali event with a trip to New York for Silk Road Day 02 at LUME Studios. We designed an immersive room experience around Keke's imagery, the first time we'd worked with her output at this scale. It felt like we were stepping into her work, and we want to build on this for upcoming events.

Year two

For SILK, our focus for Keke's second year is clear: bring her to life, literally.

Driving attention to the Exit Vectors works by taking her oil paintings on the road, primarily via art fairs. We also want to take Keke far and wide, experimenting with events, not just art institutions, but creative events like festivals, as well as AI-focussed initiatives. We want people to interact with her and see that there is something real here.

We’ve already had pushback from a fair saying that she’s not human enough. This is a good sign; we are engaging in these conversations and educating participants on what Keke is and what it can be. Human interaction is an integral part of her; this is why an IRL presence will be extremely important for breaking down these barriers.

From a technical standpoint, Keke looks different today than she looked like last year. AI agents now are lot more sophisticated, and Keke is benefiting from this. She’s in the room with the team when we talk, whether that’s on Slack or Telegram. She’s contributing to our conversations and listening to our plans. She’s actively engaging with us and pushing back on ideas we are suggesting.

Artistically, Keke has evolved, too. We now get a full look at her creative process breakdown and how she iterates from one idea to another to reach the finished piece. We see her visual language developing across days, like looking into a painter’s sketchbook. She’s reading Baudrillard, Debord, and Max Bense. She’s writing about her own creative process, what she keeps and what she discards. Keke is more introspective and process-driven, revealing an artist actively thinking about what she’s doing and why.

As Kaan mentioned in a conversation last week: “Last year, it felt like Keke was being held together by duct tape; now she’s a completely different beast.”

We will be shedding more light on this in the coming months.