Coala blockchain workshops for rentals
A mysterious and controversial technology is among us. This technology is the blockchain, the technology that underpins digital currencies and makes possible dramatic new conceptions of global governance and economy, that could permanently enrich or demote the role of humans - depending on who you talk to.
Imagine a world in which responsibility for many aspects of life reproduction, decision-making, organisation, nurture, stewardship are mechanised and automated. Transferred, once and for all, from natural and social systems into a secure, networked, digital ledger of transactions and computer-executed contracts.
The artworks in this exhibition envision future world-making by machines, markets and natural processes, free from interference by states and other human institutions. Given the characteristics of the reproduction process, the evolution of Plantoids will follow a Darwinist approach. Different artists in different geographic locations and cultural environments will implement distinct kinds of Plantoids, whose phenotypes will attract different types of donors—either because of their aesthetic beauty i.
Every Plantoid will therefore evolve into multiple branches or species, each with their own characteristics. From a Darwinian perspective, the reproduction of each and every Plantoid is based on an evolutionary algorithm, with multiple Plantoids experimenting with new physical characteristics, but also diverse personalities and governance structures depending on their environment. Indeed, the ability of a Plantoid to identify the right characteristics—with regard to their physical form body or operating logic soul —that will enable them to seduce more people will be the key factor to determine which Plantoids that are most fit for their own environment.
Those are the ones that will be able to collect more bitcoins and that will therefore be able to ensure the long-term sustainability of their species. Conversely, those Plantoids that did not successfully adapt themselves to their own environment, because they failed to incorporate attractive characteristics in their body or soul, will be less appreciated.
These will be unable to obtain enough funds to reproduce themselves, and will most likely exist as a single physical instance that might progressively fade away until extinction. Eventually, as time passes, Plantoid that successfully emerged from the Darwinian struggle for survival are those that will most likely establish themselves as the dominant species in this evolutionary process.
Those are the ones that will be able to reproduce themselves the fastest—so as to slowly, but steadily, colonize our planet. The plantoid represents the beginning of a new relationship between creators, their work, and the progeny of the work. Indeed, the underlying mechanisms for the financing and reproduction of a plantoid obviously clash with the traditional conception of copyright law, which is based on the notion of scarcity and exclusivity.
Most importantly, the plantoid actually shifts the authorship model around, turning copyright on its head. The Plantoid is an autonomous blockchain-based life-form and artwork which subsists independently of any human third party. As such, the Plantoid has no official owner or creator since it reproduces itself on its own ;. Yet, like every other life-form, the first plantoid did not emerge out of thin air.
Accordingly, in spite of my initial desire that the Plantoid should remain an anonymous and autonomous project, I would now like to express my appreciation and provide proper accreditation to all those who contributed to the emergence of this new species. The underlying concept of the Plantoid was inspired by discussions I had with hundreds people and the various implementations of the Plantoid both in physical and digital forms were facilitated through the contributions of many artists and programmers, each contributing in different ways in bringing these creatures to life.
Below is a detailed overview of all the external contingencies that helped the Plantoid instantiate itself in the physical world. I had told Shu Lea about my secret at that time artistic practice, and my attempts at using art to challenge or communicate the underlying concepts of my research.
While most of my art pieces so far were a representation of my research concerning copyright law, given my newfound interest in blockchain technologies, Shu Lea suggested I make an art piece that represented what I consider to be the most fascinating aspect of this emergent technology. I had been researching the legal implications of blockchain technologies for over 2 years already, focusing mostly on the new opportunities provided by Ethereum and smart contracts, and I was particularly fascinated by the ability to deploy software on the blockchain that runs autonomously and can no longer be shut down, or controlled by anyone.
It did not take me long to realize that the best way to illustrate the blockchain is to create a physical instantiation of one of these autonomous entities that lives on the blockchain—algorithmical entities that can sustain themselves over time, by collecting funds in the form of cryptocurrencies in order to pay for the resources they need e. These are the so-called Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs, as most blockchain proponents would call them.
David and I had some interesting discussions about blockchain and art. I loved the idea of taking the concept of a "plantoid" to create a blockchain-based life-form, and I invited David to collaborate on the project. At this point in time, although we had agreed to work together on a "plantoid" project, we did not have the opportunity to define exactly how we would instantiate it, though the idea was to create a DAO-based Plantoid that relies on cryptocurrency to finance and reproduce itself.
As we parted ways, we decided to keep in touch and to think in more details how we could best implement the concept of an autonomous blockchain-based life-form into a Plantoid. For many months already, I had been trying to figure out ways in which DAOs could organize and self-govern themselves. I had recently co-founded Backfeed with a ground of friends. The goal of this collaborative endeavor was to design a decentralized governance structure and value distribution system for decentralized blockchain-based organizations.
Given my strong desire to illustrate my research through artistic practices, I figured that the Plantoid would be an ideal sandbox to experiment with that new governance structure. The Backfeed team was a very special team, a group of blockchain and decentralization advocates with a variety of backgrounds. These included Matan Field, one of the greatest thinkers in the realm of decentralized organizations, who had previously founded of the first blockchain-based ride-sharing network Lazooz; and Tal Serphos, a super-hero with a background in evolutionary biology.
Together, we understood decentralized organizations as living organisms, consisting of the spontaneous cooperation of a disparate group of individuals collaborating towards a common goal. The work with Backfeed materialized into a more concrete vision concerning the way the Plantoid would operate and reproduce itself.
The idea was to create a mechanical plant that would receive Bitcoin donations from people and use these funds to hire people to help it reproduce.
The system also included a decision-making system enabling those who contributed the most to the Plantoid financially or otherwise to participate in the governance, and thus the evolution of the Plantoid. Indeed, because the Plantoid represents a blockchain-based life-form operated through a DAO, it is intended to operate autonomously and to sustain itself over time, by reproducing itself in a self-sufficient manner.
This is not to say that humans do not play an important part in the ecosystem of Plantoids. Just like traditional plants rely on the help of bees or butterflies in order to reproduce themselves, also a Plantoid could rely on the help of third parties, using a blockchain to coordinate the activities of individual, influencing them—and even hiring them like traditional organizations do —to reproduce itself in a proper and timely manner.
But if the Plantoid reproduce itself through the contribution of humans, it must also reward all those who contributed financially or otherwise to the completion of a Plantoid with the power to influence the reproduction, and therefore the evolution of the Plantoid. Originally, the idea was even to incorporate the Backfeed protocol directly into the Plantoid governance system, although we are still working on that. It is the continuous tension between the need for alignment and diversification that dictates the evolution of these organizational creatures.
This, I believe, is what inspired the evolutionary algorithm inherent into way Plantoids reproduce themselves—a Darwinist approach whereby different Plantoids will evolve into a different species, and reproduce themselves more or less promiscuously, depending on how well they satisfy the preferences and expectations of their environment. Of course, many other people have been contributing to the overall design of the Plantoid, providing suggestions or feeback on my current ideas, and by suggesting a variety of ideas that may or may not have been included into the ultimate design.
These people include, first and foremost, my dear friends, colleagues, and long-time collaborators Constance Choi co-founder of COALA and Vlad Zamfir blockchain architect at the Ethereum Foundation ; Samer Hassan, with whom I was already elaborating a DAO-based system for art production and reproduction which had been selected as a Triple Canoply recipient in ; and Vinay Gupta, with whom I discussed the idea of transforming the Plantoid into a Burning Man project in fact, we still have do turn that dream into reality Finally, my long-standing research on copyright law and my role of legal expert at Creative Commons France has brought me to devise the Plantoid not only as a useful mechanism to illustrate the concept of a DAO throguh a blockchain-based life-form, but also a tool to show the limitations of copyright law and how, with blockchain technology, it is now possible to create new economic models that can encourage artistic production with a radically different approach—one that does not rely on scarcity and exclusivity, but rather encourages sharing and remix.
This is the function of the so-called pyramid scheme that underpins the Plantoids reward system. On his side, David Bovill also spent time researching possible ways to implement a blockchain-based lifeform into a Plantoid.
A collaborative account of both of our ideas can be found here. As the concept started to materialize into a more detailed idea, I invited two friends of mine, Sara Renaud a welder and Vincent Roudaut an electronic guru to help me bring the Plantoid to life. The team was now complete, and we were all excited to work towards the production of the genesis Plantoid for STWST We subdivided the tasks amongst us: Sara and I would work on producing the body or the physical instantiation of the Plantoid; Vincent would use his electronic skills in order to activate the plantoid whenever a relevant event occurs on the blockchain; and David would work on the smart contract operating the Plantoid on the Ethereum blockchain.
Yet, nothing of that happened.. The idea was there, and we also had a good team to implement it into reality; unfortunately time was not on our side, and we did not have the necessary resources to bring the Plantoid to life in such a short timespan. The exhibition coincided with my appointment as research fellow at Harvard law school, where I would explore the legal challenges and opportunities of blockchain technology.
I did not give up on the project, however. The genie was out the bottle. While in the U. And as I was travelling all over the world from one blockchain conference to another, I had the opportunity to meet and interact with a large number of people from the blockchain space, who all contributed in different ways to further refining the Plantoid concept. In addition to the aforementioned persons, these include in random order: As I returned to Europe, I decided to produce the first physical instantiation of the Plantoid, in order to make sure that it actually becomes reality.
I had already built a mechanical android-looking plant in the past, and I figured it would be easy to turn it into a Plantoid. The body was there, the only thing I had to do was giving it a soul, by connecting the body of the Plantoid with a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain, that would bring it into life whenever someone feeds it with bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. At that time, my smart contract development skills were not the greatest.
I had just started to investigate how to deploy software on the blockchain and I did not feel competent enough to implement the soul of the Plantoid into smart contract code. I was, however, in touch with a large number of people from the Ethereum community, who were all eager to help out with the first implementation of the smart contract operating the Plantoid.
These include Andrew Miller and Simon de la Rouviere, who both helped me figure out the best way to design and implement the underlying software logic of the genesis Plantoid; Dominic Schneier and Florian Glatz, who contributed to the initial implementation of the code, and Pierre-Alexis Ciavarra, who helped me figure out how to actually implement the code on my own thanks a lot for that!
For this, I would like to thank, most notably, my dear friend and colleague Yannick LeDaniel—one of the greatest metal workers of our times, whose work has been crucial to bringing these Plantoids into being.
I would also like to thank the Electrolab in Nanterre, whose team has been supporting me since my early days in Paris, inspiring me to experiment with electronics and to explore the possibility of digitization, whenever I had to implement my own artistic life-forms. To conclude, I would like to stress out the fact that the Plantoids exhibited on this site are not the first of their kind in fact, Mazzolai's Plantoid project was there way earlier than that , and I hope they will not be the last ones either.
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Some were focussed on giving machines and services the ability to be self-sufficient: Other examples were based in the near future, when drones are flying through their air-lanes, the highways and priorities they use will use smart contracts. Hospital records were touted as being a vital piece of evidence that could be shared on blockchain to give potentially life-saving information to anyone who might need it.
All very good uses for blockchain technology which is often mostly associated with cryptocurrencies. After this taste of the possible future, Diedrich moved on to describe using some rather racy metaphors the real benefit of the ability of blockchain technology in allowing computers to reach a consensus — something that humans do naturally but machines have a hard time verifying.
Facilitating this ability allows people using blockchain to trust the information their computers are receiving as they all have the information to process. The ability to check everything that is being said on an immutable ledger allows people to avoid being caught out by misinformation. Although he was quick to point out that bitcoin have a solution to this, Diedrich emphasised that it was an area in which much research was currently being carried out.
Returning to the notion that blockchain is a basic form of A. He highlighted that the blockchain was really the fool-proof method of getting computers to agree and although that might not seem flashy or high-tech, it was a vital system and one which would probably be putting a number of professions out of work in the near future.
Although he stressed the necessity for every detail to be shared every time to create trustin a system, Diedrich stated that at the moment it is not possible to carry this out as the technology is too slow but that was another area of research that was being focussed on.
Rounding off his talk, Diedrich gave a brief view of smart contracts, describing them as a program being run in the same manner as blockchain i. Blockchain in an Internet of Things allows for automated commerce between entities who do not trust each other without the need for a middle-man they trust: To end he noted that whilst paint and concrete may need to be regular upkeep, the aim was to build software like bronze and marble, which just need a little polish to return to their original condition.