“Flipping copyright on its head: artists at the service of the art”
An Interview with Primavera De Filippi
By Anna Seaman, curator, MORROW collective.
As an artist and legal scholar, Primavera De Filippi has been researching ways to investigate the challenges of copyright in the digital realm, both academically and artistically for many years. In 2013, she went to Harvard University to investigate the legal challenges of digital technology, with a specific focus on peer-to-peer technologies and decentralized networks. In this context, she was initially fascinated by Bitcoin During her fellowship at Harvard, she decided that Ethereum would become the core focus of her research, and in particular the legal challenges and opportunities raised by smart contracts, DAOS and blockchain technology more generally.
But it was her art that she used to further investigate and articulate her research.
“All of my art pieces illustrate the legal challenges raised by the digital environment, but they are deliberately analogue,” she said. “The effect is to show that the problem is not the internet or the digital medium itself but the limitations of copyright and the legal system to keep up with the pace of artistic innovation.” It was within this context that Plantoid was born.
A Plantoid is the android equivalent to a plant. It is an autonomous blockchain-based lifeform designed to mimic the reproduction patterns of plants, feeding from cryptocurrency and using humans as pollinators. In their physical form, Plantoids are metal flower-like sculptures each linked to a cryptocurrency wallet. A Plantoid’s reactions depend on the amount of cryptocurrency sent to its wallet and the information that it receives.
The Plantoid species has been through several mutations. The first plantoids were Bitcoin-eating plants, which, once fed with BTC, reacted by lighting up, playing sounds, and moving in a “dance of appreciation”. With the advent of Ethereum, subsequent Plantoids have been administered via smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain, holding the funds sent to the Plantoid. Different Plantoids have been endowed with different governance models encoded into the smart contract, experimenting with alternative power structures, and giving these blockchain-based lifeforms the ability to elect the artists who should be commissioned to create a new plantoid. The early plantoids were plutocratic — where the decision rested with those who donated the most currency. Different governance models were implemented until 2023, when De Filippi developed a third generation of Plantoids, reproducing themselves by means of digital seeds (a.k.a NFTs).
“I learned from the environment,” she said. “As bees like colours and smells, humans have a weakness for art and capital. The Plantoid seeds allow you to both interact with it and get voting rights over the output, but also make an investment into an NFT asset that you can speculate upon. And the more you do that, the more royalties you create to feed the Plantoid’s treasury.”
This brings us back to the gray areas of copyright law from which De Filippi, as a legal scholar, first began. The Plantoids deliberately pose unanswered questions: ‘Is it possible to have copyright over something that has been created by a machine with no clear provenance of human interaction?’ or ‘Who owns the assets?’; ‘Can a machine be in a party in a legal contract?’, and so on.
“[With Plantoid] I tried to create an artwork that illustrates the most interesting legal challenges [surrounding smart contracts, DAOs and blockchain in general] all in one piece,” she said. “It was also important that it was physical and interactive so that people could better understand these issues.”
Through Plantoids, De Fillipi found a way to materialize future legal challenges into the present, and, by making a physical sculpture, she gave her audiences something tangible through which to process those challenges.
The first seed-generating piece was Plantoid #13, deployed in April 2023. Plantoid #13 acts as a digital instrument: once ‘fed’ with ETH, it creates music according to data received through touch-sensors and processed by algorithmic generators, before being minted as an NFT with corresponding video.
“It is like a musical instrument but from a digital and crypto perspective,” she said. “And it becomes a ‘seed-ocracy’; one seed, one vote.”
Plantoid #14 and Plantoid #15 are poets: when ‘fed’ they will ask you questions about the future you are dreaming of, and from the answers, will generate a poem with a video illustration of the poem created through generative AI. Currently De Filippi is working on Plantoid #16.
With its many mutations, germinations, and seed productions, the Plantoid lives up to its description as a blockchain-based lifeform, which is also innovating in the legal field.
“Usually when you buy art, you are giving money to the artist to continue their work,” De Filippi explained. “But with the Plantoid, the money doesn’t go to the artist, it goes to the artwork, giving the artwork decision-making potential according to the governing structure.
“It is a way of flipping copyright on its head, changing the hierarchy and putting the artwork at the centre, putting the artists at the service of the art,” she said.
With infinite possibilities and potential, the Plantoid may have started off as what seemed like a far-fetched speculation but now, it is a metaphor for a future as yet unrealized and a vehicle for contemplation.
This editorial is part of a series of essays and interviews contextualizing MORROW collective’s {R(Evolutionaries);} project, exhibition and sale commemorating a decade of blockchain art. Launched at Art Dubai Digital 2024 and brought to market in collaboration with SuperRare Labs Team and Sotheby’s.
For more info www.morrow-collective.com/revolutionaries
