ABOUT

Autonomous Forest removes ecosystems from the economic sphere, protecting them from material- and profit-driven exploitation. Autonomous Forest is an association and a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) dedicated to acquiring and collectively stewarding forest land. Through the DAO, members participate in transparent, decentralized governance, voting on everything from administration to potential expansion. This hybrid structure fuses the legal status of the German Verein with the openness and accountability of blockchain, creating a techno-legal framework in which nature is collectively held, safeguarded from extraction, and allowed to regenerate on its own terms.

Autonomous Forest questions the notion of land ownership. In contrast to models driven by individual and market logic, it establishes a collective legal entity that enables democratic decision-making. Rejecting traditional industrial forestry practices, Autonomous Forest embraces ecological processes that allow the environment to evolve autonomously in response to change. To enable this form of regeneration, a new technological and legal entity was developed that combines German association law with decentralized ledger technology. In this way, this art project builds new digital and ecological spaces for care, experimentation, and shared responsibility. It sets a precedent for ecological responsibility that relies on neither state nor private ownership and designs regenerative, communal futures for human and non-human actors alike.

Autonomous Forest is initiated by the art collective terra0. Across their various projects, they explore how economy and ecology intertwine. Since their inception in 2015, terra0 has explored how ecosystems can become economic agents and engages in questions of collective ownership. Their first work, terra0 Whitepaper (2016), proposed a self-utilizing forest which, with the help of sensors and smart contracts, sells logging licenses and ultimately accumulates capital. Later works have iterated and reflected back on the claims set forth in the Whitepaper, continuing to center on emerging technologies’ potential to support new forms of ownership, and the different conceptions of agency they may thus entail. terra0 raises questions around autonomy and agency in culture and law; novel distributions of ownership; and regard for the natural world within and beyond market capitalism.

LAS Art Foundation is a Berlin-based non-profit art foundation, working at the intersection of art, new technology, and science. In 2021, a dialogue began between terra0 and the LAS Art Foundation, which ultimately led to the collaboration on Autonomous Forest. The development, research, and implementation of the project is funded by the LAS Art Foundation. You can read more about the project from their perspective here.