Phytocene is an NFT related to the collective work of Oscar-winning designer Nicolas Becker, musician Agoria and bio-physicist Nicolas Desprat, produced and curated by 91.530 Le Marais.
Phytocene, from the Ancient Greek word phytos (plant) is an immersion in the inner workings of nature, an experimental work minting bioscience and music, at the heart of the intangible communication and nature among itself.
Plants communicate with their surroundings through an intricate, almost indecipherable network of signs. Our human language, in comparison, is simple.
By placing ORP-30-2-A special probes in the soil of Le Marais, the scientific and artistic team collected the data of a millésimé hemp plant, from its respiration to its photosynthesis. Seen at a microscopic scale, bacteria collected from the soil of the Marais form and deform into communities, revealing their way of “creating society” in this particular ecosphere.
From this real-time data, the plant’s identity and means of expression, will generate a vegetal musical texture to the rhythm of their growth.
In translating the crypted language into a virtual video- and soundscape, the artists and scientists join forces in a heuristic attempt towards the translation of the two realms, and finding a common ground, in which the probes serve as channels between human and vegetal language. Plant intelligence takes over, to interact with human-made music.
Phytocene mirrors the plants’ full life cycle, from seeding, growing, to the ultimate harvest. The first vegetal NFT to show the entire life of a plant will be a logograph of the respiration of the plant, a window on the workings of the vegetal world, authenticated by a digital ownership.
Integrating the work on a blockchain is an endogenous process. As the phytocene is intangible by essence, blockchain is the answer to the questions that arise in the encounter between human, artificial and vegetal intelligence. Soil forms the original blockchain, as human technology imitates nature’s logics. The digital and physical life of the work evolve in unison. A simultaneous exhibition of the work will be held in three locations; Paris, London and Le Marais.
Instead of anthropomorphising plants and trying to understand them through our human paradigm, Nicolas Becker, Agoria, and Nicolas Desprat encourage self-phytomorphization: think like a plant.
