terra0 is an artist collective of Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling and Max Hampshire, working since 2016 on technological systems that let ecosystems manage and sustain themselves. Their work is built on the Ethereum blockchain and uses decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to let areas of land act as economic agents in their own right. In 2016 they published a whitepaper asking whether a forest could legally own itself.
In 2018 they released Flowertokens, an installation of 100 dahlias each represented by an ERC-721 token on the Ethereum mainnet, its condition tracked daily by a camera and computer-vision system. Visitors could buy and sell the tokenized plants through a companion website, and all 100 sold within three hours of the project's July 2018 launch. For the exhibition “Perfect and Priceless” at Kate Vass Galerie in Zürich, terra0 presented Flowertoken n.100, a dried, arranged flower mounted with its trade and valuation statistics. That same year the collective's self-owning, self-exploiting forest concept was shown in the touring exhibition “New World Order”, curated by Furtherfield. terra0's work has also been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica, the Biennale de Lyon, Schinkel Pavillon, transmediale and the Vienna Biennale.
