Primavera de Filippi Solo Exhibition
Curated by Grida
Art as Lifeform,
Living Systems
October 9 – 20, 2025
Art has always sought to mirror life. The painted gestures of prehistoric caves captured fleeting motion; Renaissance anatomical drawings probed the body as both scientific object and aesthetic form; the avant-gardes of the twentieth century imagined machines animated with vitality. Throughout art history, new aesthetics have emerged from the shifting boundary between technology and life.
​Primavera De Filippi brings this lineage into the present. She is both an artist and a legal scholar at Harvard University, working at the intersection of art, law, and technology. Internationally recognized for her pioneering research on the legal and political dimensions of blockchain, she gives material form to her insights through the creation of blockchain-based lifeforms—synthetic life systems that evolve and reproduce autonomously through cryptocurrency interactions. These works bridge conceptual research with speculative aesthetics, exploring what it means for life itself to become programmable.
​Her seminal Plantoid breathes and reproduces on the blockchain like a mechanical plant, while Arborithms, Protocolites, and Aminals emerge as new species born from the roots of code and algorithm. Like music without score or conductor, they generate resonances that shift with every moment, traversing the boundaries of law and institution, human and machine, nature and code.
​For this solo exhibition at ArtVerse, a constellation of her works and research-driven projects collectively examines the roots and potential futures of blockchain. By bringing artistic experimentation into dialogue with legal inquiry, the exhibition maps decentralized systems not merely as technologies but as ecosystems of synthetic life—philosophical and cultural paradigms that challenge our definitions of creation and autonomy.
​Through her unique vision, De Filippi invites us to reconsider agency, authorship, and the lifeforms of code itself. This retrospective not only gathers decades of her explorations, but also launches new works into the world. Past, present, and future converge here, allowing us to witness art as synthetic life — a living system in perpetual transformation.
Flora Byteanica, Mad Cow edition
A botanical dreamscape—or a digital fever dream? This Alias emerges as an untamed offspring of machine overindulgence and recursive creation. This AI model, born from the obsessive overfitting of synthetic plant imagery, spirals into a world where the lines between flora and bytes dissolve.
Like a mad cow caught in a loop of its own making, the model was fed on a diet of its own progeny: images generated from itself, by itself. The result? A self-referential hallucination that transcends order and dives the chaotic elegant of the digital flora. Parameters were pushed beyond reason, beyond scrutiny—coaxing the algorithm into a raw, untethered state of digital delirium.
In this space, byte and bloom collide. Each generated image is a distorted relic of the model’s recursive lineage, where petals pixelate, vines fray into fractals, and leaves shimmer with an uncanny, alien light. It’s a botanical glitch—a fragmented Eden of machine imagination.
1 of 1 / 25 Artworks | 0,1 ETH | Buy Now
Plantoid Series
Living Sculpture at the Intersection of Plant, Code & Art
Plantoid is a blockchain-based lifeform that bridges the physical and digital: a hybrid organism whose body lives as a mechanical sculpture and whose spirit lives as smart contract code. It “feeds” on cryptocurrency, inviting human participants to nourish it by sending funds—and in return, it issues NFT seeds, granting those who feed it voting rights and aesthetic participation. When sufficient capital is collected, Plantoid triggers a reproduction process: it calls for proposals from artists, then autonomously commissions a creator to realize the next physical and digital iteration. Plantoids question authorship, value, and life itself. They reassign agency from the artist to the art object, making the sculpture itself a living, evolving entity. Through its merging of plant metaphor, blockchain logic, and collective participation, Plantoid invites us to reimagine how life, creativity, and governance can intertwine.
Arborithms 2025
Arborithms is a generative blockchain lifeform project that grows a digital forest from code and participates in evolutionary logics.
Each Arborithm is an NFT tree whose traits are encoded as “DNA” within the token ID; that DNA is rendered into a 3D tree, with branching structure, trunk width, foliage, and mutations derived from genetic code. Trees long to reproduce: when two Arborithms mate, they generate a new offspring tree that inherits traits from both parents, with occasional mutations. Importantly, an Arborithm cannot be transferred until it has been used for reproduction — meaning collectors must act as cultivators rather than mere holders. Arborithms also enact a cross-ecosystem design: revenues from their reproduction help support Plantoids, fostering interdependence between art ecosystems. In presenting Arborithms on screen and in code, the project suggests it could one day breed independently without requiring a full computer — simply via display infrastructure. It asks: can a forest live inside screens? Can generative life break free from processors and become ambient?
