Curated Conversation:
Agoria

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Sébastien Devaud, known as Agoria, is a digital artist whose works marry physical with virtual, living with cryptic. Agoria is now one of the most active artists in the emerging Web3 world. His entire artistic practice revolves around biological generative art, meaning the creation of works using algorithms, artificial intelligence and data from the living world. He works with scientists to design works that combine art, music, the Metaverse and science, with the aim of bringing the living world into the blockchain.

THE INTERVIEW

An: Let’s start by discussing the series you currently have on SuperRare.

Agoria: Actually, we could say {Centriole} was the very first collection minted on SuperRare. This is a very important collection for me because it was kind of the foundation of all my reflections and thinking about what I call biological generative art. It explores how we can stop opposing the physical and digital—how we can merge them and make people rethink what digital and physical truly mean.

{Centriole} was actually a collection about contemplating what happens in your brain before you make a decision. What’s happening in your brain before any word comes out of your mouth or before anything that might snap your decision into action? What drives it? Is it your soul, your intelligence, your will? Or is it something else? I still don’t have the answer.

What was fascinating is that I worked with Alice Meunier, a fantastic biologist in Paris, who has her own research laboratory. She explained to me that centrioles are the foundation of all the decisions we make. In your brain, there is water. And in this liquid, there are cilia that push proteins. When one protein is pushed by the cilia and connects to another protein, you make a decision. For the cilia to push, though, there are certain processes driven by the centrioles—one of the elements that makes this happen. The incredible thing is how fast this occurs. There’s so much happening inside us that drives everything making us alive—it’s just incredible.

I’m mentioning this because I feel people have forgotten that life itself is, in a way, the ultimate code. It’s living code. People often overlook the fact that even a tree, or ourselves, originates from a biological code. When we work on digital art, we tend to think everything is created by computers. But there’s still an instinctive, organic, biological input behind it. I love questioning this through art.

This first collection, {Centriole}, is really about asking whether we are in control of ourselves or not. Are we really sure? For example, everyone talks about the soul or intelligence, but do we even know where these are located? Is intelligence really somewhere in the brain? Or is it all around us? We don’t truly know. Even though we study it, I don’t believe it’s entirely localized. It’s vertiginous to think about.

What I also love is that when you see cilia under a microscope, they look like galaxies. The tiniest, most infinite elements in our bodies look like stars. When I showed people the cilia pieces, they asked, ‘Are these galaxies?’ That’s what’s happening in your brain—before you make a decision.

{Centriole} #1

In collaboration with Alice Meunier, biologist.
Has the dispersion of information superseded human consciousness at the center of our evolution?
Exploring this theory, i thought interesting to wonder which biological mechanism snap our choices and decisions process.
{Centriole} is a plunge into another dimension. A bottomless space where one travels between constellations of centrioles. Each cell is at a different stage of its metamorphosis. Some progress through a slow and barely visible process, while others have reached a quick, intense and explosive phase. 
Like the galaxies, some are contracting, others are expanding.
By exploring the cell, we penetrate into our own mysteries.
Biological generative art lives within us: centrioles are scattered, within the cell, surrounding the nucleus that shelters its DNA. Around a world, its world, our world.
Reality is not interpreted, it is visualized: a collective motion brimming with distinction and dynamism. The centrioles flow like pixelated stars orchestrated in time and space. Their singularities arise. The invisible is unveiled, alive.
Spining disk videomicroscopy
A pixel is 2/10000 of millimeters in our brain.
One second represents 80mn of the cell dynamics
Sound by Agoria.
Film mp4 based on works by Alice Meunier, research director, IBENS, CNRS.

An: What did you learn from the process of creating this art series?

Agoria: I learned that we don’t really know. For example, I think most of us are very ego-driven, and as an artist, I am too. Everyone tends to be ego-driven to some degree—it depends on the level of it. But for so many people suffering from frustration, mental illness, or whatever form of struggle, often caused by thinking they lack success or meaning, maybe realizing that you might not have been fully in control of it could help.

It’s a bit like saying, “Okay, if you don’t want to meditate, then maybe you should watch something that actually makes you feel fine.” I mean, everything is taken so seriously these days. That’s why I love to work on serious projects that, ironically, help people take things less seriously.

An: Can you tell us more about {CompndArt Collaborations}? 

Agoria: So, the {CompndArt Collaborations} is just something I felt inspired to do because it’s a collection I created with Ledger, and we’re celebrating its two-year anniversary in November. I felt like, when I see so many artists struggling around me, I could use my little bit of leverage to speak about them. I decided to mint pieces for them as a kind of curation. I like the idea of shining a light on them. Even if we split the proceeds from the pieces, I don’t take anything for myself. It’s not about me, and I love that my collectors get to see their work.

I was so happy for Mattia Cuttini. He’s such an amazing artist, really! I think his work is fantastic. I first met him at a fantastic residency where so many artists came together for two weeks, and that’s when I got to know Mattia. It was such a great occasion, and he’s a truly talented person.

{Comp-Crack}

Comp-ndArt is an initiative that highlights artists from all backgrounds, inspired by the map {Comp-nd}.
https://l-ai.agoria.dev/
This third selected artwork was created by legendary Mattia Cuttini, he remixed {Comp-nd} #5617:
The Noise
The Error
The Crack 

It’s funny because I hear many artists saying, ‘Nobody cares about us anymore. Nobody invites us to galleries or exhibitions or anything.’ And I think it’s just a matter of perception. This space is still so young. It’s so young. Six months or a year might feel like decades to some people, but I keep telling them not to worry. Of course, there are cycles and trends, but this space is still in its infancy. You’re still part of something very young, especially in terms of art, galleries, and everything.

An: Where did your fascination with biology and technology start?

Agoria: I was a really bad student. I was so bored at school. Recently, I’ve given a few conferences where people asked me to speak about AI. They all seem to see me as some kind of oracle, but the first thing I tell them is, ‘I have no clue what the future is going to be.’

If there’s one thing I’d love to emphasize, it’s that I don’t believe in artificial intelligence as intelligence. I don’t believe in algorithms as intelligence or in AI as something that will augment us. I don’t buy into any of that. AI has been around for 70 years now. From the beginning, AI was meant to help us understand our brains—it was here to help us understand ourselves.

Now, I think AI needs to be seen differently. AI should stand for alternative intelligence. For that to happen, we don’t need the best students; we need the worst students. Only the worst students can make AI truly become an alternative intelligence. We need people who think outside the rigid frameworks of the world. We need people who see and live with different perspectives. Otherwise, we’ll reduce ourselves to something narrow, a small path, and lose all the diversity. It’s already happening.

We need AI to be in the hands of creatives. It needs to be in the hands of people with perspectives that are different from the tech leaders in places like San Francisco. We need people who think out of the box with AI. Otherwise, it would be so sad. Such incredible potential would be reduced to just bad innovation.

Because innovation can be bad. But progress? Progress elevates us. And with such incredible possibilities, it would be a shame if AI became nothing more than a bad innovation.

{Compendia+} 2024 #1

Thousands of successive human actions are recorded on each piece.
They reveal the remnants of thousands of messages that have been replaced one after the other over time, over the years.
What remains of the dominant culture? What remains of the culture we are sold?
{Compendia+} is a collection of physical+digital pieces which questions the supposedly organic, programmed and systematic repetition of human gestures. The algorithm contains life or life defines the algorithm ?

An: What are your thoughts on artists’ concerns about AI replacing them and the controversies surrounding AI?

Agoria: For sure, AI is already here with us and has already replaced many artists—that’s for sure. But I’ve created a lot, and I remember hearing the same thing about electronic music when it started. People were saying, ‘Oh my God, electronic music isn’t real music, and it will replace musicians.’ But actually, no—it created a new kind of musician.

I think the difficulty now isn’t that AI will replace artists; it’s that it will make it even more challenging to be an artist with these tools because they’re so accessible. Everybody can use them. You have to be really inventive to create something very specific, something with real vision. Otherwise, many people using these tools will produce things that, in two years, we might have already forgotten. We’ve seen so many images that our eyes are becoming bored—clinically bored—with the outputs of AI.

It’s the same with music. It’s so easy to create music nowadays, but it’s very, very difficult to stand out and be unique. Music has become more about consumption than art. It’s like filler—something to fill the gaps in time. We don’t form the same emotional connection to it anymore because we have instant access to any track. Before, you might have spent six months or even a year trying to find a vinyl record, and when you finally got it, it felt like a treasure. You wanted to listen to it deeply, to really experience it. Now, you can just go on your phone or ask Siri, and it’s there instantly. Music has lost that sense of ritual.

I’m not saying there isn’t still amazing music—of course, there is, and there are still incredible artists. But the accessibility has changed everything. And I think the same thing is happening with art. Blockchain has been amazing for digital artists because it’s finally made art more accessible and put it on the map in a way that wasn’t possible before. But the downside is that this abundance can make art feel less rare.

As artists, we always need to think about what we want to create and be mindful because it’s so addictive to mint things, to constantly put out work. Sometimes, you’re grateful you didn’t mint something, because that moment of restraint keeps your work rare.

For example, I’m working on a project in the coming months where I’ll create an AI music player. Every time someone plays a track, the music will be unique to them. My song on Spotify is done—it’s finished. But with this player, the version you hear will be only for you. I don’t know what it’ll sound like—maybe your version will have no vocals or no bassline, or maybe it’ll have a long intro. My version might just be drums and vocals. It’s impossible to speak about a specific version because it’ll be different for everyone.

I think that’s pretty cool. It’ll be a limited edition, and people will have a rare, unique version of the song. They can download it if they like it, or they can play around until they get a version they really want, and that version will belong only to them. They can choose to share it or not—it’s up to them.

I like the idea of using blockchain in this way, and in the future, I might explore it further to make music feel rare again, to give it that sense of value it once had.

An: It reminds me of the project you did with the Musée d’Orsay. It has a similar interactive element where the audience can engage with the piece, and something special is revealed to them. What do you think about this type of installation and works that actively engage with the audience and participants?

Agoria: So it was kind of a dream, honestly, and it happened very fast. I was so lucky. When Musée d’Orsay called me, it was maybe two or two and a half years ago now. They said, ‘we love your biological work and the film you did. We’d like to have your version of pieces from the Impressionism period—Renoir, Manet, and others.’

At first, I said, ‘I’m not a sculptor, I’m not a painter. Are you sure you want me to do this?’ And they said, ‘Yes, yes, we would love for you to be part of this project.’

It was, of course, a fantastic opportunity, and I said yes immediately. But at the same time, I felt a lot of pressure. First, I didn’t want to be disrespectful to the legacy of Impressionism because it’s such an incredible period of art, and it’s easy to get it wrong. Second, Musée d’Orsay is in the top five most-visited museums in the world—it’s huge. So, I felt responsible not just for myself but for the whole digital art scene. If I messed up, it could have caused problems for other artists and future exhibitions in museums like this.

I wanted to create something that connected the physical and digital worlds again. The museum itself has no screens or sound, and I typically work with screens and sound. So, I wondered, ‘How can I bring my style into this project?’

Together with my partner on the exhibition, we started brainstorming. We came up with the idea of using QR codes as a kind of door to something else. Then, we thought about how to use them creatively and smartly. That’s how the sculpture came about. The sculpture had light rotating around it in this immersive room we designed. When the light aligned, boom—the QR code would appear.

Next, we had to decide what the QR code would lead to. Once people scanned it with their phones, we came up with the idea of having them blow into their phones to symbolize the essence of life. Their breath would actually create and draw a generative piece on their phone. Everything was random, and the way they blew into their phone determined the rarity of the piece. It was funny because some people got so into it. One guy spent almost 10 minutes just blowing into his phone. I loved seeing that engagement.

There were about 100,000 visitors to the museum. Most museum-goers were there to see the old masterpieces. Before entering the room, we’d ask if they wanted to participate in an NFT or interactive experience. Many of them said, ‘No, that’s not for me,’ but once they got inside and saw the light, the sculpture, and the interactivity, they adopted it in seconds. They didn’t even realize all the technology—blockchain, wallets, crypto—working behind the scenes to make it happen. Everything was mintable by them for free.

It was magical to see older people, 70 or 80 years old, saying, ‘Can you show me where it is in my wallet? I want to share it with my grandson.’ It was beautiful. The act of blowing into a phone to create a piece inspired by museum masterpieces was magical, and now they’re all onboarded to the blockchain.

That was the first piece, but the second one was even more important to me—much more brainy and nerdy. It was a film where we used yeast in a bioreactor to represent the life of Gustave Courbet through his paintings. The yeast would ‘draw’ on his paintings, transforming them as part of the process. It was an amazing project to work on, though a bit more niche. I think we might mint stills from the movie because it’s a really beautiful piece.

I was so happy to see the reactions from art critics. Seeing yeast interact with and transform a masterpiece from Gustave Courbet was powerful. It sparked so many discussions about how long a piece will last. Everyone is stressed about what will happen to digital art in 10 or 15 years. But even with traditional paintings, we have to restore them after 30 or 40 years.

This whole experience was deeply meaningful to me, blending innovation, legacy, and the digital art scene.

An: I feel like the theme of living artwork, which has its own lifespan, is a recurring concept throughout many of your projects—biological generative art in a sense. Can you tell us more about how this concept of living artwork and biological aspects manifests across your body of work?

Agoria: So with {Compend-AI}, I was thinking: what would be the most generative act a human can do? And I thought about the poster guys—the ones posting on walls, all the advertising for concerts, shampoo, politics, whatever. Every time I was on tour—whether in New York, Tokyo, or wherever—I would follow these guys at night to see where they were putting the glue and everything. I’d go with them while they were peeling off the old posters.

But what caught my attention was the remnants left behind on the wall after they removed the posters. Those remnants felt like the most significant biological generative gesture humans could make over the years. Think about it: for maybe 30 years or more, people have been posting on walls every day to advertise something. Those remnants became the meeting point of all these generative human acts—ways people communicated what they were doing. It’s like everything we do in life eventually gets represented on a wall, to communicate something or to sell something.

So I realized that those remnants were actually the most significant part of this generative gesture. I started capturing them. Sometimes I’d make little adjustments to the composition, but most of the time, it was just about capturing what was already there, everywhere I traveled.

That’s the {Compend-AI} series. And what I’m doing now is training models on all these images I’ve collected. It’s about teaching the model to see what’s hidden from our eyes, to find something in these photos that we can’t immediately see ourselves. It’s a kind of paradox—training a model, a machine, based on the human perspective.

This connection between the biological generative art of humans and what machines can do generatively—that’s why I think this series has been so successful. It’s this interplay between what humans can create actively and what machines can interpret and generate in response.

{Compend-AI-X} 2022 #10 : Air

I look for the immanence of the living into the code, especially in the {Compend-AI} series. The difficult part was to capture a human generative process that couldn’t be questioned. For a year I traveled capturing human gesture repetitions, in order to build my own precise database. It has been a long and exciting walk where the poster maker appears as evidence. I followed them a lot and I captured all remnants on the walls everywhere in the world, my DJ tour helped a lot here! It’s one of the most incredible human generative processes. First, it questions the culture we are constantly sold, close to Jacques Villegle or Raymond Heins works. Second, the remnants on the walls are the perfect results of the equation. The perfect iterations of our Biological Generative life.
Once I've built the most personal dataset, the second part was to look for patterns or similarities with the Living. My friend Johan Lescure has then been essential here. We tricked the algorithms to reveal what the eye couldn't see inside those data materials. Insanely, we are revealing forms and patterns really close to the living.

An: Why did you choose generative art as a significant aspect of your artistic practice?

Agoria: I feel like since I was a kid, I’ve been into patterns. Since I was a kid, I mean, I’ve always been drawn to that—also with music. Electronic music, of course, is full of patterns. It’s really mathematical in a way, and as I said before, I’m passionate about the code of living.

When it comes to my art, as I mentioned, I’m not a very good painter. I’m a very bad sculptor. I’m a bad musician too—I mean, playing keyboards or drums, yeah. For me, my curiosity has always been about trying something completely new. I’ve always been fascinated by things I’d never experienced before. That’s actually why I think I fell in love with this.

It’s also because we can do things now that weren’t possible before. I’m always in movement myself, and with generative art, we can create something that isn’t static anymore. For example, if we talk about the Musée d’Orsay, all the art there is static—which is fine. Not everything has to be about movement. Static art is also very important, and there’s something incredible about stillness in life.

But for me, I was very interested in this idea of movement, of something evolving. That’s what drew me in, and I fell in love with it.

An: I love your curiosity about so many different subjects. Your work spans various media, from visual arts to music, science and philosophy. How do you feel about being a multidisciplinary artist in this age? How do you think your knowledge from different areas helps you, and how do you combine all your interests and expertise into something truly creative and brand new?

Agoria: It’s difficult because we’re in a period where everyone keeps saying, ‘You need to focus on one thing.’ These days, everybody tells you to focus on what you’re good at, to focus on one area—and I feel that’s such a mistake. People always make it sound like, ’Oh my God, you’ll ruin your life unless you master this one thing.’ But what if trying something different is the thing that would actually make you so much happier?

People always ask you to focus on one area of discipline because it’s easier to market, easier to package. It’s usually driven by money. Every time someone tells you, ‘You need to focus on this,’ it’s often about money in the end. But as an artist, I think, of course, we all need to make a living, but that should be the least of your motivations for creating art.

For me, my main inspiration comes from variety—having lunch with a painter, doing a digital radio show two hours later, going to a conference and meeting a physicist to exchange ideas. That’s what gives me ideas and makes me happy. Even if, for example, I should be going to Ibiza every night, playing all the afterparties, attending networking drinks, or going to events just to keep up appearances—it’s so boring. There’s so much more to experience and try, not just for our own education but for our soul. 

Then, over time, you digest it all, and one day, it comes together in a project, connecting everything. I think combining different disciplines makes you more yourself. Otherwise, if you only know one thing about yourself, is it really you? I’m not sure.

An: What do you want people to take away from your art when they view or experience it, or even afterward?

Agoria: What I would love is for people to remember what we shared together. Yesterday, in an interview, someone asked me, ‘Why are you still DJing when you’re doing all these other things in art?’ And I said, ‘Of course I love playing music. I love being a DJ and being at parties and festivals. But if I do this, it’s because when I land somewhere, I’m thinking, who am I going to meet tonight? What will I learn from that person?’

Because every single party or event we go to, there’s always someone you meet, and you’re like, ‘Wow, thank you for this moment.’ That’s actually what drives me. I hope that, more than my art, people will remember the relationships we built together.

I had so much fun with collectors. That’s also why I loved Web3—I created private groups with my collectors where we exchange ideas daily. Sometimes they ask me, ‘How can you manage to talk with us so often?’ But I love it. I enjoy connecting with them every day. Sometimes it’s about nothing serious—like today, I was just saying, ‘Okay, I’m prepping for the conference in three months,’ and sharing whatever. Other times, we talk randomly about art or specific pieces. Most of them are like us, now trying to do things artistically. One sent me a drawing, another sent me a poem, and these interactions often turn into collaborations.

At conferences, many times when I’m on stage, I’ll leave the stage and go into the audience, because that’s where the real magic happens. I truly feel that Web3 is breaking the verticality of relationships and making them more horizontal, which I think is fantastic.

As an artist on stage, we can sometimes fall into the illusion that people are there for us. But really, we’re there for them. Without them, nothing could happen. That’s why I love that we’re changing this dynamic. In the past, there was always this pyramid with the artist or speaker on top, and everyone else below. But Web3 is creating horizontality, which allows us to rebuild better foundations for richer, more meaningful experiences for everyone.

I genuinely love having this group of people where we all do things for each other. Within these groups, we’re here to support one another, and that’s something really special. People who are interested in art are, most of the time, really interesting people. That’s something I’ve noticed—they always have something in their life that resonates with me. It’s not a coincidence, let’s say.