Seed Capital

Seed Capital — in many ways the logical successor to Premna Daemon — is a sculpture that suggests ways to rethink the economic and ecological relationships between viewers, the institution and the artwork. The artwork works as a technologically-augmented organic system which engages in social and financial contracts with its environment.

It consists of a plant (Dypsis lutescens) standing prominently on a metal sculpture in the form of a public seating. Both are not for sale and will be featured in a total of four exhibitions, the first of them being Art Dubai as a collaboration with Fingerprints DAO. Around the plant there are electrical peripherals that are connected to it by cables. Changing values and graphics are shown on displays. The seats as well as the table surface made of aluminum plate are printed with irregular colored gradients and grids.

At a predetermined interval (Total minutes of exhibition duration divided by 400. Art Dubai’s Interval is therefore 15 Minutes), a computer measures soil moisture and temperature and combines both in a cryptographically signed data packet all around the clock. If the sensor readings are in the correct range for the plant, the data package can be used to mint an NFT via a front end — if not, the smart contract rejects the data packet and the maximum number of possible minted NFTs is reduced by 1.

The values of the data package are stored in the smart contract through the minting process. The resulting vector image is generated completely on-chain and therefore doesn’t rely on external storage. The smart contract code maps the stored values of every token into a data visualization, rendering a unique gradient, which works as a visual individual timestamp.