VICE, a work by Pierre Gervois, has been acquired by Mad Arts Museum for its permanent collection in 2024.

Launched in November 2024, Lit Encounters is a long-term exhibition presented by Mad Arts in partnership with digital poetry gallery theVERSEverse. It brings one of humanity’s most enduring forms of expression into the museum space as the main event. Gathering writers, visual artists, and code poets, Lit Encounters presents poetry as a multimedia experience, showing how technological innovation can expand its power. It also educates on how the blockchain can serve as a means of publishing and sharing verse, ensuring its preservation.

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This exhibition reconsiders how poems can look, sing, and perform — inviting a reexamination of the cultural currency of verse.

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Visitors are invited to explore poetry and art across five unique spaces that offer a complete and entangled overview of theVERSEverse’s mission. In The Listening Room, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in spoken word poetry by renowned poets. poem = work of art redefines the boundaries of language and art, showcasing text-based works by today’s leading poets and artists. Being Borges explores the nuances of literary translation through AI’s interpretation. Finally, Holo/Voices presents holographic poetry readings, blending digital and analog worlds.

In a historic moment for digital poetry, Mad Arts acquires a significant collection of works from theVERSEverse, representing a critically acclaimed and diverse group of poets and artists

In the midst of National Poetry Month, Mad Arts, the first art and technology museum started by a creative agency, is proud to announce the acquisition of a significant portfolio of digital poems curated by theVERSEverse. The 22 digital poems acquired by Mad Arts represent one of the largest digital poetry acquisitions by a museum to date and reflect the ambitious program that Mad Arts has undertaken to become an innovating fixture of South Florida’s flourishing art and technology ecosystem. Marc Aptakin, founder and CEO of Mad Arts, says “theVERSEverse is reimagining how poems are both made and delivered, and we are honored to work with them to find new and innovative ways to bring these amazing works to life.”

theVERSEverse – a woman-led collective of poets, artists, and creative technologists – commissions, curates, and sells digital poems, emphasizing craft and creating lasting value that can support artists financially. Co-founder Ana María Caballero says, “I believe blockchain provenance will prove revolutionary for poets, transforming the way we transact our poems and bring them into the world, connecting new audiences with their sorcery.” Of the artists in Mad’s acquisition, Caballero adds: “From photography to generative AI, algorithmic coding to performance, the visual language of the works complements the written words in truly evocative forms.”

The collection includes “Medusa,” a piece by artist Anne Spalter – whose work is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou – in collaboration with poet Nathaniel Stern. It also includes “I Saw You,” a poem by Nicole Tallman, poetry ambassador for Miami-Dade County, with enigmatic visuals by May Naibo, a Kenyan photographer and creative technologist.

“Confessional” is by Guggenheim and NEA fellow Denise Duhamel and Cuban artist Marlon Portales, and “Consejo a la hija que nunca tendré, Para Rafaela” was penned by Caridad Moro-Gronlier, the newly appointed poet laureate of Miami-Dade County, with hallucinatory visuals by Los Angeles-based new media artist Ellie Pritts.

These and the rest of the digital poetry works will be exhibited in Summer 2024 at Mad Arts’ 50,000 square-foot museum in Dania Beach, Florida, with an opening announcement forthcoming. The works will be part of an educational initiative that will explore how cutting-edge technologies of web3 and blockchain intersect with one of the world’s oldest art forms.

COMPLETE LIST OF WORKS ACQUIRED BY MAD ARTS:

Single works
“Century Sickness” by David Hernandez and Kim Siew
“Grammar” by Julie Marie Wade and Rose Jackson
“Confessional” by Denise Duhamel and Marlon Portales
“Leitmotif, Nihilist, Epitome” by Ronnie Angel Pope and Connie Bakshi*
“I Saw You” by Nicole Tallman and May Naibo
“Future Mythologies: Medusa” by Anne Spalter and Nathaniel Stern
“VICE II” by Pierre Gervois
“The Hundred Heads” by Ana María Caballero
“Paperwork” by Ana María Caballero

Editioned works
“Consejo a la hija que nunca tendré, Para Rafaela” by Caridad Moro-Gronlier and Ellie Pritts*
“Subversión” by Mia Leonin and Tuna Bora*
“El mal concreto” by Amalia Moreno and Genki Nishida*
“¿Cómo hacer una revolución sin un carro?” by Martica Minipunto and Iván Casís*
“Hija, una herencia” by Alexandra Lytton Regalado and Gab Floramica*
“Clemencia” by Martica Minipunto and dancevatar*
“TREGUA/TRUCE” by Fermina Ponce and Anya Asano*
“Domingo 13” by Ana María Caballero and Roberto Salazar*
“El Crucigrama” by Legna Rodríguez and Tabitha Swanson*
“Canción del optimista” by Amalia Moreno and Noortje Stortelder*
“Fácil” by Legna Rodríguez and Veštica*
“Mermelada agridulce” by Patricia Echeverria Liras x Marianna Jaszczuk*
“YOU MUST VISIT HELL TO SEEK THE MASONS OF YOUR FATE” by Christian Bök and Sarah Ridgley*

Retrospective of Pierre Gervois’ early works (1989-2000)

ChaShaMa Studios, Oct 29 - Nov 3, 2024

Curated by Virginia Valenzuela

In the beginning, there was shape. Crude lines. Stagnant color. A hint of awesomeness that could only be perceived through the lens of simplicity. Then came color, dimension, composition, artistry. Those who create have been pushed by the pursuit of truth. At first, what something really looks like, and later, how one really feels. 

By the close of the millennium, the phantoms of art history had stained the canvas to the point of obscurity. From the allure of a white canvas to the finality of one painted all in black, the only thing left was philosophical gray area. One was tasked with more than just thinking outside of the box. One had to endeavor to break the box altogether. It was a fool’s task, one therefore reserved for the creative or the blissfully untrained. In the 1980’s, riddled by success and stability, a lonely political junkie fell into the chasm of gray. It was simultaneously dark and blinding, empty and cluttered, cathartic and terrifying. 

Over the course of nearly four decades, Pierre Gervois has carved away at the embellishments that make art fine, reaching for the soft underbelly of the human experience. Modern man is but an anxious animal, caught on a ledge, back to the wall, trying his best not to fall. His deep anxiety creates constraints, ushering in a new lens with which to perceive the world, revealing that at base, everything is extremely simple. If the walls are indeed caving in, and threatening to crush us in their wake, then what do we do? To survive, one need only find a place to hide.

Pierre Gervois Biography

Pierre Gervois is a French-born American artist living and working in New York City. He is a text-based conceptual artist and a crypto poet describing and characterizing social interactions at a very granular level, as well as dynamics of power in our society. His work describes social interactions in a neutral way, without any judgment, emotion, or stated point of view.

His words are displayed on the same rectangular background from which they are inseparable, present in all of his pieces. He practiced painting from the early 1990s to 2021 when he started to create digital artworks minted on the blockchain.

He has been represented by TheVERSEVerse Gallery since 2021. His works have been acquired by museums for their permanent collections such as the Museum of Wild and Newfangled Art (NYC), the Tezos Foundation, the NFT Museum of Newberry, and the Mad Arts Museum in Florida. 

Gervois has lectured about text-based conceptual art and crypto poetry at New York University, The City University of New York, and the University of Anchorage Alaska.

POEM = WORK OF ART

AN EXPLORATION OF LITERARY NFTs WITH THEVERSEVERSE

01-30.4.2022, DFC Francisco Carolinum Museum (Linz, Austria), presented in the Cryptovoxel Mateverse.

POEM = WORK OF ART documents the early days of poetry on the blockchain and explores how new technologies are empowering language artists across many mediums, enabling collaborations, and unlocking exciting realms of writerly creativity. In three parts, the exhibition is dedicated to poetry as art, crypto-conceptual poetry and generative texts and presents, among other things, collaborations by renowned writers and a global selection of visual artists. Presented in cooperation with TheVerseVerse.

Pierre Gervois’ piece “Mario” (2022) was presented in the section “Crypto Conceptualism”, as defined below by Christian Bök and Kalen Iwamoto:

Conceptualism constitutes a global school of avant-garde poetry whose practitioners explore the “limit-cases” of writing, troubling our preconceptions about creativity and authorship. Conceptualism takes its inspiration from the work of such artists as Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, Yoko Ono, and Sophie Calle (among others), all of whom have striven to reduce creativity itself to an array of “rules,” whose logic culminates not in the mandatory creation of a concrete, artistic artifact, but in the potential argument for some abstract, artistic exercise.

Conceptualism in poetry often resorts to the use of stolen words, forced rules, asemic forms and even cyborg tools to mobilize a diverse variety of anti-expressive, anti-discursive techniques – taking an interest in texts that critics might dismiss as too readymade, too formalist, too illegible, too digitized, to be considered lyrical writing. Conceptualism on the blockchain continues to challenge romantic notions of poetry and test the concept of writing itself against the duresses of both the artistic establishment and the literary establishment.

The crypto milieu blurs the line between artwork and writing, offering a new way to play with the material of language. Not only can the poet work with computerized technologies (like GANs and NFTs) to create a diverse variety of artworks, thereby expanding the practice of poetry itself — but the poet can also interrogate the sociological implications of this crypto milieu (with all of its social manias), doing so in order to showcase some of the many risks that might await us in such an exciting frontier.

The poets of crypto can mine the processes, protocols, and functions of the blockchain to create newer “rules” for writing, introducing glitches into their texts, scraping data and stealing info from feeds filled with a lexicon of crypto idioms. The poets of crypto can now experiment with the constraints imposed by NFTs: be these limits on file sizes, on grid views, on scales of thumbnails, on brands of currencies — all of which become "forms" for poetry. The exhibition shows how avant-garde poets have always bent technology to their will.

The GUARDIANS ⚔️ Project uses AR to bring attention to at-risk communities in the Amazon Rainforest.

Created by the social impact DAO MONOGRAMA, in tandem with SuperWorld, The Guardians project launched a groundbreaking NFT art event to commemorate and celebrate the indigenous Pater Surui and Cinta Larga communities of the Amazon Rainforest. The GUARDIANS Project features work from over 60 talented artists from around the world, with each piece representing a “Guardian” to keep watch over the indigenous territory in the Metaverse, and with sales from the NFTs on SuperRare going toward helping the Pater Surui and Cinta Larga communities.

Using Augmented Reality (AR) tech from SuperWorld, the Guardians will be geolocked in the Metaverse to the real world coordinates of land belonging to the respective tribes in the Amazon. In addition, SuperWorld will gift 70 plots of virtual real estate to the indigenous communities around the perimeter of the tribal borders as a symbolic reclamation of the land stolen from them over decades of oppression and mistreatment.

Pierre Gervois contributed by his piece “11th Parallel”, honoring the memory of the massacre of 30 members of the Cinta Larga Amazonian tribe in 1963 by members of a rubber company.

Curated by Vanessa Coleman and presented at Art Basel Miami 2021, “Metavirtual” is an exhibition of NFT artists showing the new generation of crypto artists exploring the infinity of the Metaverse.

The VERSEverse is a literary gallery where poems are works of art.

The VERSEverse is a curated platform where collectors discover poets, and poets discover the infinite potential of the Metaverse. A place where writers, artists, and technologists come together to make magic, and readers encounter words in new ways.

The VERSEverse

The series “Social Status, Moral Order and Public Hygiene” was exhibited at the MOWNA Museum (New York City) for the exhibition “This Show is curated by a machine”, Sep 23, 2021 - Jan 31, 2022.

MONOGRAMA is a Fair Trade Decentralized Autonomous Organization designed for the ones interested in building their digital identity linking Crypto Art to Social Values such as Humanitarian and Environmental Causes on the block chain. Pierre Gervois created the piece “V for Voter Suppression”.

Pierre Gervois’ artwork “The inner life of Cryptopunks VIII, Cryptopunk #757” has been selected to be part of the group exhibition “This must be the place”, at Fort Gallery, curated by Vanessa Coleman.

Pierre Gervois is represented by Snark Art Gallery (New York City) since June 2021