Jared Malton
Basic Instructions Before Liquidation Earth

This new body of work by Jared Malton is as much about digital archaeology as it is an urgent societal warning. Deriving his methods of painting and sculpture from a cache of pure abstraction, the works display a sense of ambiguity and unease while drawing heavily on the nostalgic influences of mid-century Minimalism. Malton’s new work looks both retrospectively and towards the future, comparing his lived experience with technology and digitalism.

In recent months and years, Jared Malton has found himself both repelled by digitalism and AI, while drawing healthy inspiration from analogue interfaces. The nostalgic qualities and simplicity of analogue devices offer a confidence that AI cannot: the absence of ambiguity. He has been investigating the idea of AI replicating the human artist’s hand at will through digital means. But a human artist’s hand attempting to replicate a digital image purely through the mechanical process of painting proves far more difficult. Through these processes of "digital appropriation," he has noticed a fundamental difference: the unmistakable presence of something organic in the finished work. We are human, after all.

The tangibility of the analogue has become something of a novelty, as nearly everything now exists at our fingertips behind a heavy burden of circuitry and glass. What Malton sees, in his personal view, is growing social dysfunction and the dark, misleading, ever-dwelling presence of AI. We are always watching, forever glued. It is time to unplug.