The French artist Gustave Courbet was committed to painting only what he could see. He rejected academic convention and the Romantic era that preceded him, embracing a Realist style that bridged the gap between the mind’s eye and the easel. 

"The world comes to be painted at my studio," he said, referencing his masterpiece, The Painter's Studio (L'Atelier du peintre). Courbet’s painting – which today hangs at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – features friends and fellow members of the Parisian cognoscenti, like the poet Charles Baudelaire and art critic Champfleury.

The Painter’s Studio was notably omitted from the 1855 Paris World’s Fair. Outraged (and despite having 11 other paintings selected) Coubet protested the event by opening his own exhibition nearby – a fiery riposte demonstrating the hellbent iconoclasm that inspired impressionists, cubists and other pioneers.

Sébastien Devaud – the multidisciplinary artist and web3 champion who makes music as Agoria – recently contemporized Courbet’s piece. In partnership with the Musée d’Orsay, the producer worked with a team to create Interpretation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae of The Painter's Studio by Gustave Courbet, which uses yeast to recreate the conditions of historic events during Courbet’s life, “revealing its living nature.”

Devaud also contributed the piece {Σ LUMINA}, an interactive sculpture that allows visitors to use their breath to activate digital shadows and create unique, mintable collections of Orsay art that visitors can take home with them – not something one can typically do with fine art. 

It was that increased accessibility that first attracted Devaud to web3. Artists overlooked by an exclusive fine art world could now display and sell their work to an engaged community. On their own terms, they could generate connective tissue between their art and the world around them.

Both Saccharomyces cerevisiae and {Σ LUMINA} are examples of Devaud’s career-spanning mission to reconcile seeming oppositions, mitigating the sense of “the other” – from biological to digital, web2 to web3, to the constraints of time itself. Recently we sat down and discussed his work within those liminal spaces – a story that begins as a young boy in Lyon.

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In the late 1980s, when Devaud was about 12, he discovered a love for house music emanating from inner city Detroit, a world away from his childhood home in the French countryside.

That music set the tone. In 1994, at age 18, he and his collective Bande Sonore started organizing raves wherever they could find space, from warehouses to fields, convening at a designated “agora” – Greek for “meeting place,” and the namesake to Devaud’s artist moniker. 

In 2003, he helped launch the acclaimed – and ongoing – Nuit Sonores Festival in Lyon. He co-founded the label InFiné two years later, and in 2016, formed the label Sapiens Records, through which he still releases much of his music.

His web3 adventure began in different fields at a new “agora.” During the pandemic, Devaud worked with some friends who own a hemp plantation at Le Château du Marais, a 980-acre estate about 30 miles southwest of Paris. The project – called 91.530 Le Marais – is an “an open-sky R&D laboratory” that links art, nature and science.

The artist teamed up with sound designer Nicolas Becker – who won an Oscar for his work in the film Sound of Metal – and biophysicist Nicolas Desprat. They created  Phytocene, “an immersion in the inner workings of nature, an experimental work minting bioscience and music.”

The trio used soil probes – which “serve[d] as channels between human and vegetal language – to observe how hemp’s microorganisms formed and deformed communities. They gathered data to help them understand the plant’s expression and identity across its life cycle. Over time, they generated “a vegetal musical texture to the rhythm of their growth,” as well as a seven-minute film documenting the process. Phytocene was minted onto the blockchain in July 2021 as a non-fungible token (NFT) – Devaud’s first. It sold for £12,600.

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After Phytocene, Devaud continued to mint his art, falling in love with the Tezos community – “fantastic art lovers, amazing collectors and artists who support each other,” he told me. “It's the first time I really got what was web3.”

For Devaud, web3 is all about “circularity” – a newfound degree of access and participation that can reorient our relationship with art. “Listening to music in your home in one second – any track,” he said, using music as an analogue. “It's been common for everyone for 15 years, but before that, you needed to go find the right record, and sometimes you couldn't have it because there were no more copies.

“[Visual] art is actually doing this move now,” he continued. “It was very difficult before web3 to actually pick your taste – to pick the piece you really love, instantly. We could discuss philosophically if that’s good or not, but the fact that it's actually possible is fantastic.”

In a fine art world that values exclusivity and prestige, accessibility can be scarce. Most people cannot engage with a piece of fine art, let alone own one. Through the Musée d’Orsay partnership, Devaud saw an opportunity to transform that ‘space between.’

{Σ LUMINA} is a sculpture whose shifting shadow generates QR codes. When scanned, the code offers access to a collection of Musée d’Orsay pieces – chosen by Devaud and the piece’s co-creator, Johan Lescure – that evolve as guests blow into the microphone of their phone. The unique piece can be live minted via the generative art platform fx(hash) on the Tezos blockchain – and, unlike anything else you might see at a fine art museum, it can be taken home. “I think it's quite cool to change the paradigm in this way,” Devaud said.

Based on those visitor-generated pieces, the artists created and auctioned seven original works on the Tezos-based NFT platform Objkt, donating the proceeds – about $53,000 – to the museum. “The visitor is part of it and that's the circularity,” he said. “This is exactly where all the dots are connected and we're holding it together – that's what I think about web3.”

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The Musée d’Orsay is emerging as an innovative voice amongst traditional museums, having recently created a Tezos-based souvenir program for a Van Gogh exhibit that doubled as a membership program. The museum’s identity, though, is still wrapped up in its collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist masterpieces – the largest in the world.

Devaud read the room and knew he had to align as best he could with that tradition. “I thought going with the full armada of screens or VR” – as is common in more tech-forward arts institutions – “would have been kind of disrespectful,” he said, describing his approach to the digital piece, Interpretation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae. “The trick here was how we could show digital art without screens on the walls.”

Devaud once again teamed up with Desprat, as well as three other scientists from the Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies Commission and the National Center for Scientific Research. 

For three months in a lab at Paris’s Museum of Natural History, the team developed a yeast population in a bioreactor. They sought to “embody the living inside the paint,” ultimately deciding to “encode the paint into a genome” and revivify The Painter’s Studio. 

“We decided to do L'Atelier because it’s a painting that’s actually speaking about a period of time,” he said. “You have Napoleon inside the paint. You have Baudelaire inside the paint. You have Jean Fleury.”

They grew the yeast in conditions that mimicked the historic events of Courbet’s life, inputting markers into the bio data and then into the paint itself. From Courbet’s birth to his death, the viewer watches a two-minute film in which the yeast and paint respond to those landmark events. During Napoleon’s conquest, for instance, the paint disappears behind the chaos, reflecting the brutality and loss of life during that epoch.

Interpretation by Saccharomyces challenges the static nature of paintings. It reminds us that generative art is not limited to AI-image models like stable diffusion – the “one-click AI thing,” as Devaud called it. The piece revitalizes the biological conditions of 19th century Paris, and through the same circularity that brings us closer to the art, Devaud offers us passage back through time itself.

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For Devaud’s final contribution to the Musée d’Orsay – a new track called “Getaway” that features Chic co-founder Nile Rodgers and “soul-appella” singer Madison McFerrin – the artist traveled through time yet again. The artist debuted “Getaway” – billed as “a time portal between eras and aesthetics” – during a DJ set on February 23 in the Musée d’Orsay nave.

“I adapted the piece because what Madison was singing was, ‘we can't travel time,’ during a moment and in a room where we actually traveled time, giving life again to Orsay spirits and Orsay artists,” he told me, once again blurring ordinary lines of distinction. 

“I love that – that you say we can't travel time,” he continued, smiling. “But we will find a way.”