Like tornadoes set loose in a hedge maze: introducing Jared Madere’s AI-generated NFTs
“[Jared Madere’s work] attempts to abolish structures such as superiority of discourse, western time perception, accustomed linearity and hypothesis of causality.”
–Noam Segal for Nicolas Bourriaud’s Crash Test
About the Artist
Artist Jared Madere’s work encourages open-ended possibilities within mediated contexts, mobilizing viewer subjectivity as an engine for new propositions. Like a suite of tornadoes set loose in a hedge maze, Madere creates digital and physical environments and injects them with symbols that refuse to be tied down, allowing new meanings to constantly emerge, rearrange, and contradict. Using AI, generative imagery, and in-person collaborations based on linguistic prompt, his practice employs automated systems within more traditional structures of signification as a means of eliciting an emotional response.
Madere’s installations have been exhibited internationally at various institutions and galleries including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, La Panacée, Liberty London, The Istanbul Biennial, Armada Milano, David Lewis Gallery, Bortolami, and The Watermill Center. In 2018, Critic Clayton Press wrote of Madere’s work in Forbes, “It is difficult to capture the very real sense of ecstatic, if not romantic, intoxication that Madere conjures with his installations, environments and visualizations.”
For his first NFT-minted work, THE CRAZY LIFE IS NUTS/COCOA STRAWBERRY CLUB, Madere presents three socio-emotive video collages or virtual music boxes whose soundtracks are entirely code generated and synthesized using AI. The AI techniques employed by Madere rapidly reimagine an entire world based on a flood of clues, communities, and the musicality of collectivity and consensus. The viewer’s conception of the world is redefined according to a generated sequencing of fleeting elements that rush into and out of her field of comprehension.
Each work in the three-part CRAZY LIFE suite revolves around the emotions and fantasies stirred by the mania of the global marketplace and the theatrical majesty of its peaks and valleys — a living system producing outcomes which seem at once coincidental and inevitable, rational and lunatic.
The first video formally points back to the open-air bazaar as subject, the traditional marketplace for the exchange of goods and information in human civilizations — an environment which stirs our predilections for the edges of euphoria, devastation, and the thrills of calculated nuance. Horses carrying carts of produce are presented alongside trays of meat and fruit (commodities), while a torrent of still portraits bursts from the seams of the frame to a score of code-based choreography. A common theme in the artist’s practice, portraits of locals are integrated from the site of the work’s creation — here, Istanbul and Milan. The intended visual homage to these individuals is a URL approximation of IRL festivals, at which lanterns or balloons bearing names and images of loved ones are ceremoniously released into the sky.
Drawing from his visual lexicon of flowers, babies, fruit, animals, as well as scenes of social and emotional negotiation, Madere’s work troubles our associations with evocative images by divorcing them from their familiar context, forcing us to challenge our means of identification. Within this narrow gap between the transmission of information and comprehension, the artist invites us to take up shop and engage with a universe that circumnavigates our familiar mechanisms for meaning-making.
The next two works in the suite present cinematic snapshots of the emotional tensions surrounding intergenerational asset ownership and wealth inequality. The seduction of the marketplace and the commodification of love (Valentine’s Day, bushels of roses divided into dozens, strawberries bathed in chocolate) also appear as themes. An image of freezing children is juxtaposed against a flooded pickup truck drowning in a swimming pool; a primordial chocolate fountain violently erupts in a dream-like poly-vaulted cathedral architecture with walls adorned by constantly rebirthing AI generated mural; molten cocoa splashes on a vibrating field of hovering strawberries.
Technology, while a useful tool, is not the only means by which the artist has explored generative, indeterminate processes. In physical exhibitions, Madere often elects to work with local tattoo and graffiti artists, chefs, scientists and craftsmen, instructing them to generate imagery based on an open-ended script subject to individual interpretation. He frequently prompts his collaborator to execute his instructions using non-traditional materials such as bisected squid bodies or figure skating hairnets stuffed with raspberries, challenging systems of meaning associated with more familiar media.
Rejecting comprehension in favor of ambivalence, CRAZY LIFE colonizes the gulf between what is presented and what is understood, tempting us with a rich universe of information but offering only the cliff notes.
The Cocoa Strawberry Club
As suggested by the penlight graffiti shimmering in curing chocolate, The Cocoa Strawberry Club offers her members a portal to The Crazy Life through a system of tiered membership.
Purple stem berries grant ownership of the first video in the CRAZY LIFE suite.
Green stem berries grant ownership of the first video in the CRAZY LIFE suite.
Gold stem berries grant ownership of the second video in the CRAZY LIFE suite.
Pink stem berries confer ownership of the third and most baroque video in the CRAZY LIFE suite, featuring a vaulted chamber whose walls, adorned with an undulating AI mural, cradle an exploding chocolate fountain pumping liquid Cocoa onto a hovering field of vibrating strawberries.
2 Chrome Duchesses and a Chrome Queen allots ownership of the entire suite of CRAZY LIFE videos.
Rare Chrome-leafed berries grant two of the three videos from the CRAZY LIFE suite at random.
Each of the three videos features a special surprise ending that is only accessible to their owners.
Artist website: https://www.jaredmadere.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaredmadere1/?hl=en
Scorpio Discord: https://discord.gg/RDAmSa6GjA
