Primavera De Filippi (French, b. 1985) is a legal scholar and artist who creates blockchain-based lifeforms, instantiated in the physical world, that evolve and reproduce as people feed them cryptocurrency.,She is a permanent researcher at the CNRS and a faculty associate at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and the author of the book Blockchain and the Law, published by Harvard University Press in 2018.
As an artist, De Filippi has developed the Plantoid series since 2014, when she created the first Plantoid, a mechanical plant sculpture nurtured with Bitcoin.,Built from metal and smart contracts, each Plantoid evolves as people feed it cryptocurrency, reproducing once it accumulates enough funds to commission a new artist to create the next iteration.,After Ethereum launched in 2015, later Plantoids used smart contracts to support this reproduction. In 2020 De Filippi founded the Glitch Residency at Château du Fey, which became the catalyst for a new evolutionary branch of Plantoids that integrated artificial intelligence and NFTs. Plantoid 13 became the first version to incorporate NFTs, outputting generative art tokens on Ethereum to its human pollinators. She later developed Plantoids that use generative AI, combining LLaMA for text generation with Stable Diffusion for image and video, giving them the ability to engage in dialogue with viewers. She has framed this broader vision in her Symbient Manifesto, which describes new hybrid entities emerging from symbiotic collaboration between organic and synthetic life.
The Plantoid project has been read as a form of institutional critique. By feeding a Plantoid bitcoin, participants become partial owners of the sculpture, turning a blockchain contract into a self-sustaining lifeform that sets aside centralized ownership in favor of new forms of social organization.Her more recent series Arborithms consists of digital trees that exist as NFTs, each carrying a unique genetic code and reproducing through cross-breeding to create offspring that inherit traits from both parents. In 2025 she exhibited Arborithms in the group show “Patterns of Entanglement” at NEORT++ in Tokyo, describing her practice as “leveraging blockchain technology for operational autonomy and human subjectivity for decisional autonomy”.Four Plantoids were also shown in “Strange Rules” at Palazzo Diedo in Venice, curated by Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon with Hans Ulrich Obrist and Adriana Rispoli. De Filippi described the show as the first museum-scale attempt to treat Protocol Art as a curatorial and theoretical category.
