Phytocène

June 2021 

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Phytocene is a collaboration between the musician and artist Agoria, the sound designer Nicolas Becker and the biophysicist Nicolas Desprat. 

All three have combined their various fields of expertise to explore the inner processes of the soil ecosystem of Le Marais. Phytocène is a poetic and musical representation of the soil, translating the bacteriological activity of the hemp field of le Marais.

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Phytocène, 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 of nature among itself.

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Plants communicate with their surroundings through an intricate, almost indecipherable network of signs. Our human language, in comparison, is simple.

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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 Le Marais form and deform into communities, revealing their way of “creating society” in this particular ecosphere. The real-time data, the plant’s identity and means of expression, will generate a vegetal musical texture to the rhythm of their growth. 

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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 the human-made music.

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Phytocène 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.

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Integrating the work on a blockchain is an endogenous process. As the Phytocène is intangible by essence, blockchain is the answer to the questions the encounter between human, artificial and vegetal intelligence raises. Soil forms the original blockchain, as human technology imitates nature’s logics. 

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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.

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