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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the editor-in-chief at Le Random. And today we continue our Friday podcast episodes as a companion to our Monday editorials. And today's episode is with terra0, an art collective exploring the creation of hybrid ecosystems and a technosphere, who recently released their long awaited project, Autonomous Forest, that was nearly 10 years in the making, which came out earlier this week on Monday.
And then our editorial, which also came out on Monday, was our standout art of 2025 article. It was a first for us to ask community members that we really respected to look back at 2025 and give us their favorite art of the year. So we asked 12 trusted artists, curators and collectors what art mattered most to them in 2025. And that includes people like Sasha Stiles and Christiane Paul and Raoul Pal. It's a really good overview of the art that mattered to some really interesting people. So definitely check that out.
And then I'm really excited about today's conversation, though, with terra0. They are this incredibly fascinating art collective that released a white paper as university students in 2016, which outlined the concept of how a forest might be able to own itself with blockchain technology. Basically, the idea was there back in 2016, but the technology wasn't. And so this project is a mix of art and technology and ecology and economics and philosophy. […]
[…] how you two first met and started the project. I guess it was originally, there was originally another person as well, right? I think it was in 2015. So were you in university at the time? Or how did the project begin about 10 years ago?
Paul Kolling: Yeah, it's been a very long time since we're working on this. And also it's a little confusing for us to tell this story because it has had so many different phases.
Originally, we developed this project as part of a university project. We were both studying at the Berlin University of the Arts with Joachim Sauter in the new media class. And this began as one semester project. But right after it, we realized, okay, there's something interesting in there and maybe it's worth to spend more time on this. And also our professor back then realized this. And when I can remember correctly, he gave us one semester off to continue to work on this.
Around that time, we also met Max Hampshire, who wasn't studying at our university, but who joined us in the very early stages of terra0. Back then, we were this core team of us three, but then also we were always collaborating with other people from the university or outside. And so basically we formed terra0 a little bit like a collective maybe, but we never really formalized what it actually is. It was more like this umbrella under which we worked on different projects with fluctuating people involved.
And then after a while, or after a couple of years actually, it crystallized that it's basically us three mainly. And then at one point, I can't remember when, Max went off for other projects and had to shift a little bit his focus. And then it evolved in such a way that it became us as an artist duo. But that's also the confusing thing, because we basically named everything terra0, the artwork, us as a group, the concept paper. So there's always a little bit of confusion around it.
Paul Seidler: Oh, yeah. I mean, I can just add a little bit more about history in terms of how it developed then. So when we first in 2016 published the white paper, which is this almost provocative, speculative white paper, which is about this autonomous forest, or this kind of forest which is controlled by an agent or by a computer program. And this paper was mainly, at this point when we published it, almost a speculative exercise.
I mean, we looked a little bit into the technology which we describe in this paper. And this technology existed to certain points at this time. But it was not in the right state to actually use it in real life. So at this point, DAOs were basically barely developed. I mean, I think the DAO hack was actually even after we published the paper, but I'm not quite sure. But at this point the technology was really, really nascent. Also, AI was not as big as it is now. So a lot of these core technologies we described were just not developed.
So we called this, what did we say, a near future scenario in a sense, that it's something which we think could have happened and we could build this, but it's not something which is fully developed, was fully developed in terms of technological requirements at the point where we wrote the paper.
We quickly realized this, and we also realized that we don't have the capital to actually implement this project by ourselves, because we were at this point art students and didn't have the money to just buy a piece of land in a size where this makes sense.
So we took the white paper and split it up in multiple chunks of ideas, you could say. So really specific concepts which were described in the white paper, which we then isolated and almost strategically built these test cases in which we're trying to get these ideas into art installations, which could be shown in an institutional context, because this was the time where slowly art institutions were waking up to blockchain. But this was even before the NFT boom. So this was essentially a time where blockchain seemed to be having a really utopian potential, where art institutions were interested in critical engagement with blockchain technology, something which a little bit slowed down after the NFT hype of 2021.
Paul Kolling: Maybe because I think there's something I always kind of forget about, this development phase. But there was quite a long phase where we developed this as part of this art school, art discourse thing. But then there was this time where we really sensed, okay, this is worth realizing it, this is worth implementing it on a one to one scale. And we were really looking in all different directions to enable this.
So we had a lot of talks with venture capital. People came to us. We thought of doing this as a startup. We had actually worked a couple of years together in state funded research projects, which were really disappointing in the results. But this was an approach from us, because we were kind of really looking, okay, how can we realize this? There's something interesting on the table. We don't have the money to do this. We also don't have the recognition as artists to go to an institution back then.
I think it's really interesting because I went the other day through our archive. And so it's just this year, or one and a half year, where we were on startup fairs, where we talked to really different actors and looked 360 around to possibilities. And I think none of it really makes sense, partly because we didn't want to make it a product. We kind of wanted to do it as research, but then state funded research is also really constrained in what it can produce.
We kind of ended up in the arts because there was, as Paul said, there was suddenly an interest from institutions in discussing this. And we realized, okay, there's actually quite a nice space to put these ideas out. There's a way of actually producing these test cases and then having also a feedback. But I think in retrospect it doesn't make sense that we ended up so adjacent to the art world. But I think it was actually not a linear direction or paths we followed.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. And I guess it makes sense that it wasn't. I guess the art direction would have pushed it in a non-capitalist direction too, which I think aligns with the project.
And yeah, so you talked about how it wasn't ready to be developed at the time of the white paper because of the technology, or wasn't ready to be realized at the time of the white paper. So it was more of a near future project. Is 11 years or 10 years? Is that about... I know, sorry, I guess it's more like nine years, nine or 10 years. Yeah. I wonder if that's about what you expected.
And then can you just talk about that arc, so from 2016? Because it includes other projects too, right? Like Premna Daemon and Flower Tokens. And so there were these other steps along the way. And yeah, I just wonder, did you expect it to take almost 10 years? And then can you just talk about how those other projects shaped the direction of what ultimately became Autonomous Forest?
Paul Kolling: Yeah, I think from this arc it's also interesting to understand that the first project was Flower Tokens and it was in 2018. It was in an institution, it was in Trust in Berlin, which is this co-working space but also a discourse space.
The reason why we did it was because we had a talk in Amsterdam at a startup fair, and there was a guy who just handed us, or wire transferred us, 3,000 euros, because he was asking how can he invest in us. And we said, you can't invest in us. And he was like, yeah, but I like the project, can I give you some money, no strings attached? We don't even have the contact details of this person. And so we're like, 3,000 euros. And then we used this to build this installation in Trust, which was Flower Tokens.
I mean, it was a wall of 100 flowers, and then we tokenized these flowers and created a little market around it. And we sold them, of course, for like 30 euros, like a hundred of them, like 3,000 euros, which were the production budget.
And then actually we did other projects. We had our first institutional show, or a group show in an institution, at Schinkel Pavillon, where we met Simon Denny, who curated the show. It's called Proof of Work. And then it kind of slowed down again. I mean, we had talks, group shows, all that stuff. But really I think it picked up again during the NFT hype, because I think institutions were really looking for projects which had more depth in it, and kind of had to feel like, okay, we need to touch on this topic, but then it's kind of really noisy and it's hard to find something interesting in there.
And then on the other side, actually we got some unexpected retroactive funding, because suddenly this Flower Tokens project, which really, it was mostly friends of us or really close people from following the project who bought a token for like 30 euros, and nothing really happened to it, and then they got rediscovered. And we actually funded a lot of our practice afterwards from having a sudden influx of these trading fees and royalties we got from this project. And actually even other projects in Berlin who had Flower Tokens were able to sell them at quite a good price and then fund their practice a while.
Paul Seidler: But yeah, can I interrupt and just add a little bit of context to Flower Tokens and Premna Daemon? I also want to mention, for the 10 years question, it's really funny. There is a Reddit thread on the Ethereum Reddit where someone mentions, it's like the first comment under terra0, under where the first original terra0 white paper was posted, there is, oh this is a great idea, probably really early, in 10 years this will make sense. And this is really 10 years ago. So Reddit was sort of right about everything again.
[…] tokenization of actual wood. And for Flower Tokens we took this specific part, and we're looking at how do we tokenize something living, and what does it actually mean to tokenize something living? Because as an act this seemed to be really weird and also kind of brutal, right? You're like, okay, this is now a plant, you are now a tradable asset on the blockchain, what is this, what does happen with it?
For us it was quite interesting that the market relations were not the most predominant relations in this experiment, which meant that people were not trading these things as much as we imagined they would trade them, but rather they would build relations to these things. So they were more looking at them as tamagotchis rather than as tradable assets. And because they were also changing their state all the time, right, we were essentially broadcasting live how they were growing, people developed really emotional relations to these things, which didn't fit really well in the targeted market relations. So they didn't became that much of a speculative asset while they were growing, but they were only becoming the actual speculative asset after the whole experiment was done already.
Which for us was a quite interesting realization, in terms that the tokenization is maybe not only happening in these market relations, but rather that it can mean other things for people which are not easily grabbed by value, or by what we defined as capitalistic value. And I think this is something which then also developed a little bit further into Autonomous Forest. So I think in Autonomous Forest you can see this idea being revoked again, that there is this basically relation which is the thing which has a relation to the market, but it is not completely inherent in the market, or it's not about just being a tradable asset essentially.
And the second is Premna Daemon. And I will make this a little bit shorter. Premna Daemon was essentially a way how to formalize the relation between a non-human, or kind of this cybernetic entity, and an institution. So there we were the first time essentially working with law, because we set up contracts […] and formalized this relation. And I think this was the first time for us working with this mixture of both of these things […] requirements, and also through smart contracts.
Yeah, just to give you an overview how these projects actually were early experiments and then fed into the bigger projects we're doing now.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think it's really interesting how you're building relationships with these, I guess, non-traditional entities through blockchain, and using blockchain not as a market mechanism. You're using the non-market logic of blockchain, which I guess emphasizes more the ownership of something non-fungible.
So I guess to understand that shift from the white paper, and then after Flower Tokens and Premna Daemon, it seems like a pivot, like something from nature as an economic agent to the emphasis then seeming to go more towards taking nature outside the economic sphere. Is that sort of what the shift was over these last, I guess, nine years or so?
Paul Kolling: Yeah, I don't think even that. I think it was already in the first white paper actually. I remember we having our first bigger public panel discussion, it was at transmediale in 2017, and we presented this project and we realized, okay, the whole crowd is completely divided. The half of it hated it and was like, okay, this is so cruel, this is hyper capitalistic, what are you doing to nature? And the other side was really enthusiastic, was like, oh, this is a way to protect nature.
And so I think it was really interesting that we presented this, put a structure or a framework for this part of this work, and depending on how you set certain parameters it could go either way. And we also realized this because we had really weird approaches from venture capitalists, people trying to set this up to circumvent, I don't know, nature preservation regulations or so. But then also people were like, okay, there's really good means to create these nature preservation zones.
In the beginning we kind of played with this ambiguity because we thought it's interesting to understand the full spectrum of possibilities, what this technology can enable or can't. And then working on this for years and years you of course get more stronger opinions on certain matters. I think it was also kind of a deep learning curve in concepts of nature preservation and different ecological methodologies, which you can't really unlearn at one point, just by being confronted by it so much.
And then there's of course also the political landscape changes, where you would, I don't know, question how much an ambiguity can serve a purpose, or maybe it's good to take a proper stance. And then most importantly, I think it is kind of easy to come up with these really abstract ideas until they stay abstract ideas, right?
“And so I think it was really interesting that we presented this, put a structure or a framework for this part of this work, and depending on how you set certain parameters it could go either way.” — Paul Kolling 19:07
And now we're getting to how Autonomous Forest came about, because four years ago a private art institution, the LAS Art Foundation […] something. There's a real world implication for a real ecosystem, for example, attached, you know. But then also we said, okay, we can't just realize something we have drawn up like six and a half years ago, and kind of everything changed. Our position changed, the technical environment changed, the political environment changed. So we actually said we want to do this, but we actually need some more time, and doing this now would actually mean completely rewriting the whole project and updating it to our current times.
Peter Bauman: Again, it's really interesting how the blockchain is utilized and tied into the project. And yeah, we talked about how it helps to build this relationship between the audience or the owner and this entity, this natural entity that would otherwise, I guess, have a different ownership mechanism.
And I wonder too, just why blockchains are so critical, besides maybe building that relationship between something non-fungible and the owner of that token. I wonder what other purpose the blockchain is serving. So there's things like record-keeping and legitimacy and governance and accountability. And I guess, would this project be able to exist, or would it break, if the blockchain wasn't there?
Paul Seidler: To a certain degree, no, I think. But it would make a lot of actual processes quite more difficult to do in the way we want them to do. So if you think of voting, for example, like token voting, there is really no good way of doing this in a proper, decentralized way in which you can guarantee that there is no, in which basically there is no trust needed, right?
Imagine we are, maybe to make this more concrete, we are both on the board, there are like six people on the board, but we also have control mostly to the servers which run the infrastructure of Autonomous Forest. If you would now say, okay, we do a voting which doesn't use blockchain technology, just use the servers, you go to a website and you vote there. We control literally the infrastructure of the servers. But we're also on the board. That seemed to me like a kind of huge conflict of interest in a sense. And specifically if there is no way of proving how people voted. So just in terms of technology, it becomes this, you know, we're running the servers and we're on the board. So yeah, just to make a really feasible example on how this actually makes stuff easier, I would say.
Paul Kolling: Yeah. Maybe to add to this, I think the first white paper of course couldn't be conceived without blockchain. But also I think because it was back then, you know, there were a lot of legal gray areas and everything was really not really defined. And so you could just make claims like, oh, this is how it could be interpreted these days, all these things.
And especially, not all of these things, but everything we do in our project as well is within the German jurisdiction. So this was also something really important for us. And because everything is within the German jurisdiction, there would also be a way to do this without blockchain.
But I think nowadays, especially with a project like this, the hardest part is actually having people engage over a longer period of time, because everybody is, you know, it's so hard to find time, find energy, for anything. And the idea to organize a large group of people, which is not local but trans-local […] can also be reused and adapted for different use cases, or maybe different instances of a project like this. And this repeatability is something which works much better with the blockchain part than the bureaucratic side, where you can't get around having dozens of meetings with some bureaucracy clerks, etc.
Peter Bauman: So you kind of see it as an experiment in public policy and blockchains. I also wonder, we talked earlier a lot about all the changes that have taken place over the last nine or ten years since the white paper, and another one of those that also started around 2015, another big change that's impacting us today, is deep learning AI. And I wonder how that has impacted the project. I mean, is that part of the workflow at all? Or can you talk about how, or whether at all, AI has really impacted the project?
Paul Kolling: Well, I think it would have been quite interesting if AI at this level would have been around for the first iteration of it. But I think, mainly due to aspects of agency of natural ecosystem and the question, like who can speak for them, who can decide for them, can we find, do we know what a forest wants? You know, these questions which also lead often into a weird, from our perspective maybe wrong, anthropomorphization of something where you don't really have a singular subject where you can say, okay, this is its interest, etc. So we kind of approach this from really shifting, okay, there can only be a human perspective […] and a sturdy ecosystem, as in there's not much flux of a lot of plants, for example, dying off or something like this. But other than that, it's really, this is what we say, what we define as what the forest wants, and nothing else.
And I think with AI it's easily an obfuscation, that you feel like, okay, there's an external interest subject, you know, who wants something. But it's basically at one point baked into it, you know, by a human. And I think in the first project we kind of also, I mean, we said, okay, this hybrid autonomous entity acts on its own. But of course it acts according to rules we wrote into the code previously.
Autonomous Forest is not really affected by this AI development. But I don't know, Paul, what do you think?
Paul Seidler: Yeah, I think maybe to zoom a little bit out. I think there is in general the question of legal fictions, and what do legal fictions allow on basically the level of functionality.
There is a Chaos Computer Club talk from Charles Stross, who is a science fiction writer, who describes essentially corporations as slow AIs. This talk is from 2015 or something. And I think there is some really interesting truth to this, in a sense that these are all modes of organizations which allow for a certain production which is still targeted to something. All of these organizational forms, they have subject in them, and these subjects do still make specific decisions about things.
And I do think using an AI to manage the forest is not that different actually from using a DAO to manage a forest. It's just that one thing has essentially transparent rules which can be discussed all the time, while the other one has encoded rules which are harder to discuss and obfuscated in certain deep levels of essential neural nets.
So for me it's more a question of intentionality, and the question what legal fictions actually can do, and if they are helpful or not. And if we look, for example, the questions if ecosystems should become persons. This is something which is often discussed a lot, and also the question of non-human personhood in a sense of animal rights. It's always for me a functional question. What do these legal fictions actually empower, and where do these legal fictions actually help, and where do they sometimes also just obfuscate things?
And I do think this is really critical to see on a global level, because they also depend on frameworks of ontology of the people who are living through these things and legal fictions. And this means that having personhood for a river in New Zealand, where the indigenous people decide for this river, is way more aligned with their ontology, with their lived ontology, than for example if we in Germany just decide, oh, this forest is a person, because we are not having the same sort of ontology. We're people of the Enlightenment. And I don't say this in a negative or positive sense, I say this in a historical sense, right?
“And I do think using an AI to manage the forest is not that different actually from using a DAO to manage a forest.” — Paul Seidler 30:37
And so I do think there is a way different question of how is personhood defined. And I think this is also what the project is trying to tease out now a little bit, is how does it functionally differ from being a legal entity, and being this more sort of group of people who decide these things. And yeah, it's really an experiment. But from my personal opinion, a lot of these legal fictions essentially can be boiled down to decision making of groups.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, so it seems like the way that AI has impacted the project is more on a conceptual level, that it wasn't so much the technologies but more on the concept of the project and […] maybe some of the post-human ideas that the technologies have raised about non-human rights and non-human interests, and how that can extend to other intelligences, including AI, but also natural other intelligences as well.
Do you know Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst in Berlin? And I guess, are you familiar with their ideas on protocol art? Because it seems like this project would be a classic example of a protocol, or what they call protocol art.
And one thing that I've been thinking about recently is how protocols are becoming more and more complex, and how they're starting to merge with what some artists are doing with worlds. And so I'm starting to also think of maybe the next level of complexity for protocols, maybe above just using smart contracts, is cybernetic protocol stacks. Basically projects that are several different layers of protocols, all cybernetically working together. And that is sort of how I'm also thinking about artists creating worlds with these technologies like blockchains and AI.
And yeah, I just wonder how you see yourself as either creating protocols. Or does that make sense also, that once they become maybe complex enough they become maybe something different?
Paul Seidler: Yeah, I can start to answer this, but also, probably not. Probably I can't speak to all of the things you just said. But maybe let's start with, yes, we know Holly and Mat. They like the project, I think, which is really cool. I think they follow it quite for some time now and they also support it when they can. So big shout out and big thanks to them.
We know also the term protocol art. It's quite interesting. I've never digged into who was actually the first person who said it. I think it comes from that, but I'm also not 100% sure. I've seen it a lot first around more blockchain based work. Basically the whole crowd which is interested in smart contracts and what smart contracts formally can do, how these things can be appropriated to make rule based experiments, essentially. Rule based experiments with value. This is already probably two years ago, or maybe even longer, when I first heard this term.
I do think it's a really interesting term to describe essentially something which was, or for me is, a continuation of a lot of other art forms. So for example there is something like systems aesthetics, which is from the 70s. I always forgot who. What's the name of the person?
Paul Kolling: Jack.
Paul Seidler: Yes, exactly. This is the one which I find really interesting. So this is the first time in art people looked more into how systems work and how we can abstract artistic work from a specific object, but rather think of them in a, as you said, systems, as you said, cybernetic way.
There was a lot of critique of this to a certain degree. I think if you look at the artists, how they liked to pose these things and what they actually did, they kind of sort of failed. I think they kind of stayed also in the limits of the institutions, the white cubes and so on, which I do think makes sense also for the time.
And I do think there is some part of protocol art. And I mean, we're talking now about something which is not... I think no one has written an extensive article about what protocol art is. Actually I think there will be at one point, but it's pretty undefined. But for me it takes this direction from systems aesthetics. It takes also some direction from relational aesthetics. So from the question of how things are relating in specific social and cultural aspects. It's a little bit more of a question of how we can actually do that. I think there's a lot of talk about how specific social contexts relate to each other, and how specific forms of social context can be rebuilt and can be redesigned. And I think this is also something which in protocol art interests us.
And I think the third thing I would say is that it is related to software art in some sort of way, that specifically we see in early software art, before it becomes the purely, let's say, visual art form. We have a lot of examples of software media art which is about interaction, which is about protocols. And you can make really easily the case there is a history of protocols already used in software art. For example, the Telegarden, the first examples of people controlling a robot arm to essentially make a garden or water a garden. These are for me always examples of protocol art.
So yeah, I think it's more something which merges together from different forms or different strains of historic references, in the sense of historic notions.
The second point is, yes, I do think we work with protocols a lot, and we try to merge them in different stacks, as you said. So we're not trying necessarily to just use smart contracts, but we think of, okay, how do they interact with the law? How can they interact with the law, which is itself a whole stack?
And I would say specifically with this project, specifically with Autonomous Forest, we really were specific on the law. So we really tried to nail down the law, which also is why this project took so long. This is really, for me, the most important part. But we also engage obviously with a lot of places which artists normally don't engage, like the registry of the land, all of these kind of things.
And there is this net art diagram which probably a lot of people know, which is kind of like the art happens here, and this is a diagram between A and B. I think for us it's the same, but it's on a lot of different wires. The wire can be from us to the finance ministry, the wire can be from... So the material itself gets also distributed in the real world quite widely, and the artifacts are happening everywhere, which I think is one of the beautiful reasons why this project spreads so good, because it works in all of these different medias.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I think at least the way that I think about artists building worlds is there's usually a connection between the digital and the physical, and they're bringing those two worlds together within a project. And sometimes there's, well, there's maybe increasingly an AI component to it as well. But yeah, I'm really interested in how artists are thinking about complex rules.
Yeah, you're certainly right about that history, that very long history of systems in art, and what I would, or what some people would also maybe call generative art. So I did this timeline that I argue goes back, you know, 70,000 years. Philip Galanter also makes that argument. There are these art historical traditions of instructions and art that go back to, yeah, of course, Sol LeWitt and Fluxus. And yeah, lots of people have talked about that genealogy with software, and basically how what has changed with systems is just the technologies and how we can creatively implement them. And software has allowed for a lot of different and interesting things.
Paul Kolling: I think also quickly referring to protocol art, I'm always excited when something like this comes up, just because we've been in this kind of awkward situation that everybody always wants to categorize artworks or artistic positions. It's always a little bit of an awkward situation where you refer to all of these different traditions but you never really feel 100% included in them. And so we were always sitting in between chairs quite a bit. So, high hopes for protocol art. It's still being written by people like Holly and Mat and people like Primavera.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. And yeah, so there's still, it's still being sorted out. But I think your practice definitely comes up when I think about it, and especially in terms of smart contract art and how to utilize smart contracts within art.
The way I sort of think about worlds is they have richness, they have detail, they also have autonomy. And I think your projects clearly have that agentic autonomy. And then there's also, they're alive or they're living, they can reproduce or they produce something themselves, or they keep living beyond the artist's intent. And yeah, that's kind of one of the ways that I'm thinking about them.
I am interested in other links to art history, so especially links to traditions like land art. How do you see this work borrowing from those lineages? And is there anything else? I think social sculpture is something you've maybe talked about before. But yeah, is there anything you want to talk about in terms of some of the other art historical lineages of this work?
Paul Kolling: I think, I mean, it's also hard, because it was quite a diverse tradition I would say. But I think we had a critique of maybe the poster works of land art, where we felt like, okay, it's kind of interesting, but then it kind of falls back into using the land as a pure materiality to shape something out of it. And of course there was something which was also maybe overlapping more with concept art, etc., which had more depth to it. But we felt always that often these well-discussed projects neglect actually the complexity of, for example, the ecosystem on site, or the law relation built on top of it, or the social or historic context of these pieces.
I mean, if you for example think of Spiral Jetty, people always coming up with Agnes Denes, like Tree Mountain for example, which I think quite an interesting work at that time and still is. But also shows, maybe I need to be careful here, but maybe a little bit of force, because it kind of really enforces a shape, literally a geometric shape, on something, on a living ecosystem. And if you look at it, it always looked better on these beautiful drawings in the phase of conceptualization, rather than after a couple of decades where the forest really struggles, because these trees are not meant to be planted in geometric shapes and they're prone to being tipped over by wind and getting diseases. There are really interesting YouTube videos of this where people fly with a drone through it and take a look how it looks now.
And it's quite, there's some truth to it, in a sense that it's really forcing a certain sort of methodology of nature onto this thing, of forcing certain ideas of nature onto something living, and the non-intentional […] lasting, tangible results, you know, maybe because the ecosystem changed, or maybe because people can now, as is the case with Autonomous Forest, suddenly have a way to participate in a process they couldn't be participating in before, and shaping it. Maybe in the way that suddenly social groups share around, you know, people meet, become friends, I don't know. And I think this aspect of it is really interesting for us.
And I think Paul touched on this earlier, that it is also this moment of, you know, we sit down for nearly four years and draft this project and implement this, and then the result is something we explicitly designed to be taken out of our hands, you know, as in how it's going to develop in the next year, in what direction it will steer, what people it will attract. Really giving up also your own artistic agency over what's previously conceived as an artwork. I think this is really interesting, or has a kind of interesting tension, which also has a lot of conflicting implications of course. But I think it's also nice to endure and to see what really comes out of it as a process which you can't control.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, well, I think that's just how creation is going to evolve and how it has evolved, and that artists are no longer at least limited to creating finite objects. They have these different possibilities to explore, and they can use all these new technologies and new ideas to implement them in these exciting and interesting ways. And I think your project is such a perfect example of that direction in art. And that's, you know, the main reason why I wanted to chat today.
And yeah, I guess before we completely end, is there anything else you wanted to say as we wrap up?
Paul Seidler: I mean, I would maybe just add to what Paul just was describing a theoretical reference. So if you would look into philosophy for this more interconnected view of this different sphere, I think Guattari's The Three Ecologies is sort of a great way of looking at it, in which he tries to connect basically a sort of economic mode of production towards regenerative and ecological mode of production, towards something which is a mental mode of production, and how these things sort of interwire and sort of interfere.
And I do think, looking specifically at earlier land art, we can see how only certain specific aspects of these three modes were thought through, but not all of them together. And I think our project is more trying to think through all of these different stacks of sort of reproduction, I would say.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, that's really interesting. I'm really excited for where it all heads, and I'm going to be keeping an eye on it. And it was really good to see what was this week with the NFT launch on, was it Monday the 15th? Yeah, was that, yeah, how did it feel after so many years to, I mean, yeah, what did this step sort of feel like for you guys? Did it feel like the end in a way? Because, I mean, obviously it's not, but you are in the process of sort of giving up control. And yeah, so how did this step feel in the overall evolution of the project, maybe as the very last thing?
Paul Kolling: Well, I think there were already multiple steps where we gave up. I mean, there's the general meeting, we formed the association, and basically once we registered this association, at the beginning it was like 19 members and then a board of six. This was the moment where we legally gave up a lot of our agency in this project.
And then now on Monday the sale opened of the first batch of NFTs. Which, I also want to stress, we are a registered non-profit organization. All profits go directly to the association, doesn't get to anywhere else. And there all profits are then meant, we have already acquired two plots of forest, and now the new profits are meant to acquire the third one.
It's like a gradual step, so it didn't feel so intense. And it does not at all feel like an end, because we both know, I think, how much longer this project will keep us on the toes. And maybe then not as the role of the artist behind it, but rather as, for now, our shared membership of being on the board. But then also I think the coming years will really be about building up a sound community around it, which is able to steer the project further.
So I think there's still a lot of things to do. And then also I think this is now the exciting time, you know. The last four years were kind of a little bit tedious sometimes, where we were for one year only fighting with the tax office in Germany, trying to convince them that we are non-profit worthy and not a crypto scam. You know, this is the time we're happy which is over. But we're excited for whatever comes next, also because we really can't tell.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I'm excited too. I'm just excited to see where these experiments with ownership and blockchains and different stacks of protocols, how it all plays out. And it's definitely something that I want to keep an eye on. And yeah, I've just been impressed by the community's response to the project so far, and the people that are interested are, yeah, the people that I think we should be paying attention to. So yeah, it's a really exciting project, and really happy that we got to talk about it today and that you took the time to chat.
Paul Kolling: Yeah, thank you so much for that.
“The last four years were kind of a little bit tedious sometimes, where we were for one year only fighting with the tax office in Germany, trying to convince them that we are non-profit worthy and not a crypto scam.” — Paul Kolling 52:06
Paul Seidler: And thank you, it was great. Very nice.
Peter Bauman: Cool. All right, take care, guys.
