Pierre Gervois, Bootlicking (Experiment in Linguistic Investigation), single channel video, MPEG-4 movie, 720 x 1280 pixels, 02:22.

In the early nineteen nineties, when I was a student in Paris, my French literature Professor invited Philosopher Paul Ricoeur to give a lecture to the class about the concept of metaphor, a topic explored by Ricoeur in his 1975 book The Rule of Metaphor. I was incredibly excited by this lecture, and took notes non-stop during Ricoeur’s brilliant speech. After the lecture, I came on stage to express my sincere admiration to the philosopher and handed him the small yellow poster made by the students at the occasion of this lecture and asked him for an autograph. He looked a little bit surprised, but signed the poster. My literature professor, also on stage, looked at me with an air of disdain, in a silent disapprobation, as if it was inappropriate and utterly vulgar to treat a distinguished philosopher as a Rock Star.

Thirty years after, I wanted to investigate further what metaphors really were, going beyond philosophical and literary critical tools.

I decided to conduct a linguistic experiment by actually performing a metaphor and observing the result.

I thought about several possible metaphors to focus my research on, and “Bootlicking” became the perfect candidate for this investigation for three reasons.

1-The latin root of Linguistic is “Lingua” (Tongue).

2-“Bootlicking” is a metaphor about the action of a tongue.

3-I planned to actually use my tongue to conduct the experiment.

“Bootlicking” is an Experiment in Linguistic Investigation, borrowing to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn his categorization of the Gulag Archipelago as an Experiment in Literary Investigation.

The performance was conducted and recorded in a New York City photography studio without audience.

I invited each participant to self identify with his/her social class, with the help of suggested income brackets.

I gave them a cardboard with their corresponding social class written on it, and invited them to sit on a chair, placing the cardboard on their knees and showing it to the camera.

I explained to them that I planned to perform the Bootlicking metaphor and actually lick the top of their right shoe.

I also told them, that, in order to protect my tongue from viruses and bacteria, I would place a condom on the tip of their shoe.

I explicitly asked them “Do I have your permission to place a condom on the tip of your right shoe?”, and waited for their clear answer before moving ahead.

Upon receiving clear permission from the participants, I put nitrile gloves on my hands and proceeded to place the condom on their shoe.

I then kneeled and licked the top of their shoe.

The number of licks depended on their social class: Four licks for the Upper Class, Three licks for the Middle Class, and Two for the Working Class.

I then removed the condom, promptly put it in a trash can, and announced the conclusion of the performance.

Notes:

This performance was made on Sept 20th, 2023 at the Studio #22C, 545 8th Avenue, NYC, between 5:00pm and 7:00pm.

Eleven participants confirmed their presence. Eight showed up. One performance had to be aborted for technical reasons. Seven performances were fully completed and presented in the video.

The video of the performance has been produced and directed by Pierre Gervois. Director of Photography: Justin Yoon.

The artist was wearing a Nina Ricci tie (circa 1970s) belonging to his late father.

As we are cheerfully using artificial intelligence systems, and praising the efficiency and creativity of these tools, we tend to forget the inevitable bias of these systems created and programmed by human beings.

In New Conversations, Pierre Gervois illustrates how the personal opinions and beliefs of A.I. systems programmers and coders might - inadvertently or by design - affect the expected unbiased answers from these systems following a prompt.

In the same way a country’s constitution can eventually easily lead to the supremacy of the same category of people who wrote it, the mass adoption of A.I. Chatbots could lead to the reproduction of ideas, values, and concepts solely belonging to the programmers’ own cultural references.

Each piece of the series is a MPEG-4 movie, 4s, 2384x2386 pixels, Non-Fungible Token, 1/1.

New Conversations has been minted on the Ethereum blockchain exclusively for MakersPlace.

Read Pierre Gervois’ interview in MakersPlace Magazine made by Brady Evan Walker

The Gift of Love is a series commissioned by Vanessa Coleman, Founder and Curator of the Fort Gallery NFT for the exhibition “Poetic Justice” (Opening for Valentine’s Day 2023).

Each piece is a 1/1 glitched video, 1080 x 1080 pixels, 6s., Non-Fungible Token on the Tezos blockchain.

Pierre Gervois, Artificial Intelligence (2022), QuickTime Movie, 8.0MB, 1080 x 1920 pixels, 4s. (Edition of 12 Infinite Objects). Curated by The VerseVerse Gallery.

https://infiniteobjects.com/products/artificial-intelligence

Pierre Gervois, MARIO (2022), JPEG image, 14816 × 2822 pixels, 1/1, Non-Fungible Token minted on the Ethereum blockchain in the SuperRare space of The VerseVerse Gallery.

MARIO is a critically acclaimed piece exploring intergenerational guilt through a rewriting of the biography of a well-known video game character.

MARIO was part of the April 2022 exhibition “Poem = Work of Art” at the Francisco Carolinum Museum (Linz, Austria), presented in the Cryptovoxels Metaverse and curated by The VerseVerse. It has also been presented on August 6th, 2022 at the VerseVerse X SuperRare exhibition at the SuperRare gallery in SoHo, NYC. It was also presented at the Unit Gallery in London (Oct 2022).

MARIO was featured in the leading crypto art publication The Tickle, Issue #30, January 28th, 2022.

Pierre Gervois has performed multiple public performances of MARIO in New York City, including during the CADAF Art Fair NYC 2022, at Web3 NYC Gallery, 5th Ave.

MARIO is represented by The VerseVerse Gallery and minted on their SuperRare Space.

VICE explores authority and subordination in the context of space exploration and the violence it generates. Recurrent themes in Pierre Gervois’ work, social domination, accepted submission, and public humiliation orbit around the word “Vice” as the focal point of this series.

Repository is a series of 26 unique pieces created from August 2021 to March 2022.

Each piece of the series features the artist’s instantly recognizable rectangular structures with text organically embedded into them.

Drifting into the Metaverse’s deep space for millions of years, these structures have been randomly impacted by meta-asteroids leaving marks on the text and irrevocably altering it in unpredictable ways.

Available on Foundation

I have always been uncomfortable around other people. To alleviate my social anxieties, I constantly discreetly look for clues on my interlocutors' social status: How much can they make, how prestigious is their job, how do they dress or what type of watch they wear, in order to assess if they might, possibly, remotely, hypothetically, suddenly humiliate myself for some unforeseeable reason.

-PG

“Income” is part of the inaugural collection of the crypto poetry gallery The VERSEverse launched during NFT.NYC 2021

Touching the cheek of a man with your hand is an intimate act of love that can legitimately be done by a child or a spouse, but is off-limits for strangers or friends.

What can we learn by feeling the skin’s temperature, shaving, texture, and elasticity? Will this act’s physicality allow us to gain access to the man’s thoughts or feelings?

For the advancement of science and a better understanding of white privilege over the past five hundred years, a randomized sample of 200 white men’s portraits has been selected to serve as subjects of this experiment.

The collectors of these Random Homo Sapiens are encouraged to touch the cheek of their subject in any way they want, as often as they want, and share their findings with the community.

Total supply: 200 unique Non Fungible Tokens (Ethereum Blockchain)

See the entire collection on Open Sea

Watch the exhibition in VR using Cyber.io

Pierre Gervois’ MARS series features the historically documented but never seen before fourteen historic markers created by the survivors of the Great Martian Revolution (Late XXIst century) and send into the Metaverse’s deep space for safeguarding.

The fourteen pieces are the classified video transmissions received from the Metaverse’s survey ships during the encounters with each marker. Each transmission includes the sound recorded inside the ship’s cockpit, including the mandatory Bach’s Goldberg Variations, the only authorized music aboard the ships, per regulations of the Metaverse’s central government, established in mid- XXIIIth century.

Each transmission ends abruptly. All fourteen survey ships disappeared and were never seen again.

MARS is a series of fourteen 1/1 #NFT (MPEG-4 videos, about 20s. each) + One special edition of ten “Mars Prelude” (GIF image).

MARS was released in partnership with SuperWorld in July 2021, using the augmented reality geo-pinning technology.

Cryptopunks told me incredibly emotional things. Their lives have not been easy. They might have no future. But they feel emotions like us. They want us to know that they have true inner life. They have political opinions. Like us, they are faking their lives and try to appear cooler than they are.

“The Inner Life of Cryptopunks” is a series of nine works, each one about one of our friends based on the interview I had with them in April 2021.

Six lives intersect in The Appearance of Respectability series. Six individuals doing their best, with no joy or fear, to project the appropriate image to their professional and personal environment and scrupulously following established social guidelines. The Appearance of Respectability dissects the blandness and lack of emotions methodically guiding our quest for social conformity.

City Life is a series of ten digital photographs representing the views of the city and its environment as it is re-discovered in the last weeks of May 2020.

After weeks of confinement following the COVID-19 quarantine. Our eyes are slowly looking upwards, watching our environment, and looking for clues about the structural changes we are expecting to have happened during these weeks.

Colliding with the brutal murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the public debate about acknowledging white privilege, the end of quarantine catalyzes all American society’s anxieties and forces everyone to re-think and re-frame our accepted positions in the social field.

“On Oct 12, 13, and 14, 2020, I watched 15 hours of the Senate Judiciary Committee Confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett on C-SPAN and observed the power relations between the Senators, the Judge, the Senator's staff, and the photojournalists unceremoniously laying on the floor. Then I selected screenshots of some moments, put them on my atelier's wall, and started to work on the painting, under the gaze of the Senators.” -PG

Social Status, Moral Order and Public Hygiene is a series of eight Non-fungible tokens (MPEG-4 videos) exploring the internal and external dynamics of power in our society through a simultaneously combined triple perspective: Social Status, Moral Order, and Public Hygiene.

How does our own real or fantasized social status interacts with our moral values? Is the concept of public hygiene used as a tool by the dominant class to discriminate and impose their own moral values? Are our own moral values contingent on our position and trajectory in society? Does social status give legitimacy to impose and enforce moral norms?

Each work channels the mind of the spectator and leads to a suggested perspective about its own position in the public space with the presence or absence of certain parameters.