{ "schema": "ab5d-dossier/1", "slug": "john-gerrard", "name": "John Gerrard", "subtitle": "Worldbuilding at the end of the oil age.", "lede": "For two decades he has built living simulations about the things that run the world and stay out of sight: petroleum, power, the carbon we cannot see. Two of those works, *Petro National* and *World Flag*, sit in the AB[500], the point at which a museum artist took his worlds out of the gallery and onto the chain.", "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/john-gerrard/", "bibliography_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/john-gerrard/links/", "content_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/artists/john-gerrard.json", "updated": "2026-06-18", "tier": "standard", "editions": 391, "collections": 2, "otdh": { "rank": 163, "score": 12364, "collector_identities": 184, "holder_addresses": 193, "projects": 2, "current_works": 343, "raw_collector_days": 357656, "median_project_hold_days": 1289, "snapshot_at": "2026-09-14T00:00:00.000Z", "methodology_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/otdh/", "api_url": "https://ab5d.xyz/api/otdh/john-gerrard" }, "identity": { "artist": "John Gerrard", "website": "https://www.johngerrard.net/", "based": "Born 1974, Tipperary, Ireland. Lives and works in Dublin and Vienna. Represented by Pace Gallery", "practice": null, "now": "*SPIRITS* at LACMA, 2025–26; Atlantic chapter, 22 September 2026", "raster": "https://www.raster.art/artist/john-gerrard", "otdh": "[12,364 · rank 163 of 308](/artists/otdh/#artist-john-gerrard)", "holding signal": "184 collector identities · 193 holder addresses · 357,656 raw collector-days · 14 Sep 2026", "collector tdh": "[jogTDH](/artists/john-gerrard/jogtdh/) · dashboard" }, "socials": { "website": "https://www.johngerrard.net/", "x": "@john__gerrard", "instagram": "johngerrard.inst" }, "profile_image_url": "https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1800004289516990465/1zzUjYV7_400x400.jpg", "profile_image_source": "https://x.com/john__gerrard", "works": [ { "name": "Petro National", "editions": 196, "supply": 196, "artblocks_slug": "petro-national-by-john-gerrard", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/petro-national-by-john-gerrard" }, { "name": "World Flag", "editions": 195, "supply": 195, "artblocks_slug": "world-flag-by-john-gerrard", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/world-flag-by-john-gerrard" } ], "sections": [ { "heading": null, "paragraphs": [ "John Gerrard makes worlds, not pictures. Since the early 2000s his medium has been the real-time game engine, the same software that renders video games, turned to a wholly different purpose: slow, exacting simulations of real sites that run live, in step with the sun and the seasons, with no beginning and no end. The subject underneath nearly all of them is energy, and the power it buys. He arrives in the AB[500] not as a painter trying on a new tool but as an artist who has spent twenty years arguing that the simulation is the native art form of the petroleum century." ] }, { "heading": "The game engine as a stage", "paragraphs": [ "Gerrard trained as a sculptor (the Ruskin at Oxford, then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College Dublin), and a residency at Ars Electronica in Linz put a team of programmers and a game engine in front of him. His first developed engine work, *One Thousand Year Dawn* (2005), shows a young man on a beach watching a sunrise that the code will take a thousand years to complete. Time becomes a sculptural material. He came to think of the engine as a stage, with the sun as an actor that can be told to rise over ten seconds or ten centuries in a single line of code.", "The lineage he names runs through Bruce Nauman and the minimalists: resolved, hermetic objects placed on a platform and left to perform. What follows that first work, the *Smoke Trees*, the *Dust Storms*, the *Grow Finish Units* and the Google *Farms*, are all portraits of industrial systems most people never see. Gerrard insists they are not films. \"This is information,\" he says, \"this is not image, this is not a record.\" You are watching data, rendered frame by frame and discarded, the way the real flows of capital and energy move and vanish." ] }, { "heading": "Western Flag and the petromodern", "paragraphs": [ "The work that carried Gerrard to the broadest public is *Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)* (2017), commissioned by Channel 4 for Earth Day. It rebuilds the site of the 1901 Lucas Gusher, the first great American oil strike, now barren, and plants in it a flagpole streaming black smoke: an invisible gas, carbon dioxide, given an image and a banner. Gerrard calls it an invisible sculpture and a flag of mourning for the Anthropocene. It has since stood at Somerset House, in Madrid, in Hamburg, and at Desert X in the Coachella Valley.", "Around the same flag idea grew the *Flags* series: simulations of gasoline spreading across the surface of major rivers, the Danube, the Amazon, the Nile, the Yangtze. Working with his programmer Helmut Bressler, Gerrard modelled the iridescent sheen of oil on water with a thin-film refraction algorithm, the same physics that makes a petrol rainbow in a puddle. The result is a beauty he calls a toxic sublimity: the allure of petroleum and its danger held in one image." ] }, { "heading": "Petro National", "paragraphs": [ "*Petro National* (2022, Art Blocks × Pace, 196 editions) takes that algorithm on-chain. Each of the 196 works is a nation or region rendered as a gasoline spill on the world ocean, its thickness and iridescence set by that country's per-capita petroleum consumption: thin and blue-green for the low consumers, thick and lustrous for the high. Each world runs on the local time of its capital, with its own seasons. It was Gerrard's first WebGL piece, a spatial, temporal world placed directly in the browser, and the first Web3 project in the Art Blocks and Pace Verso collaboration. In 2023, *Petro National #16 (Nigeria)* entered the collection of the Centre Pompidou." ] }, { "heading": "World Flag", "paragraphs": [ "*World Flag* (2023, 195 editions) reimagines the national flag as a banner of coloured virtual smoke, each one sited in a fictitious future desert. The premise is bleak: the state as a ghost of itself, the flag a militaristic sign for a doomed, place-based order. All 195 are generated from a single 112 KB script stored on-chain, using WebGL so the worlds render directly in a phone or a browser, post place, post geography. The works were released in the order of their countries' greenhouse-gas emissions, highest to lowest, and Gerrard dedicated a tenth of his proceeds to Hometree, the nonprofit restoring temperate rainforest on Ireland's Atlantic coast.", "The two AB[500] works are bookends of a single argument. *Petro National* reflects what each nation burns; *World Flag* ranks what each nation emits. Together they turn the most ordinary instruments of the state, the flag and the fuel gauge, into a ledger of the climate crisis, written in code that will keep running for as long as the chain does." ] }, { "heading": "SPIRITS and the browser as public space", "paragraphs": [ "Gerrard's current work pushes the same instinct further into everyday screens. *SPIRITS* (2025–26), presented by the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, is a year-long, browser-based solo that unfolds across the four solstices and equinoxes. He gathers plastic sandals washed up on beaches around four great bodies of water, photoscans each into a high-resolution Gaussian splat, and lets you turn the object on a touchscreen until it reveals what it is made of: solidified petroleum, the oil age washed back ashore. He argues the browser is now the most important site we have for public art, and the touchscreen a cultural superpower artists have been locked out of.", "LACMA describes 96 recovered sandals and shoes, released one per hour across four 24-hour events: Pacific on 21 December 2025, Indian Ocean on 20 March 2026, Mediterranean on 21 June, and Atlantic on 22 September. Viewers can drag the scanned objects and press to transform their surfaces with oil slicks or ocean currents. The seasonal rhythm joins the work's ecological subject to a form of public participation that happens through touch.", "Writing for Art Basel on 22 September 2026, Gerrard develops this argument through the touchscreen, where audiences can manipulate spatial images rather than merely scroll past them. He describes *SPIRITS* as the result of sustained human judgement and weeks of iteration with programmers, even where AI assists the process. His preferred term, “art token,” connects that practice to *Petro National* and *World Flag*: the token brings a work's identity, provenance and software together. For the flag triptych at Zero 10, he reports assigning tokens to existing software editions, with access through a token-gated archive being established. The browser and the token serve different parts of the same project: public encounter and a durable structure for collecting software.", "> I suspect the game engine is the most important medium of these times." ] }, { "heading": "Art Basel Zero 10", "paragraphs": [ "In June 2026 the argument reached the largest stage. **Zero 10**, Art Basel's initiative for the art of the digital era, made its Basel debut from 17 to 21 June 2026, co-curated by the artist Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman under the theme *The Condition*, which traces seven decades of instruction-based and computational art. Gerrard showed *Western Flag*, *Flare (Oceania)* and *Standard* with Fellowship, and during the opening sales his *STANDARD* (2023), a simulation of a white flag rising from desert water vapour, sold for USD 500,000. On 21 June, the longest day, the *SPIRITS* summer-solstice phase launched with a dance at LACMA led by the electronic musician Richie Hawtin." ] }, { "heading": "Why he belongs in the AB[500]", "paragraphs": [ "The AB[500] records the first five hundred Art Blocks projects, the moment generative art assembled its canon on-chain. Gerrard is among the few in that set who came to it already established in the museum world (Tate, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn, IMMA, M+) and chose the blockchain anyway, because WebGL let him put a living, spatial world in anyone's pocket. *Petro National* and *World Flag* are not a blue-chip artist dabbling in NFTs; they are the logical next move for a practice that always wanted the broadest possible public and the most direct possible image of power. That is why they sit in the set, and why they read as foundational.", "MOTZKO's digital art collection adds a collector-side record of that practice through holdings of *Smoke Hands*, *Petro National*, *Bone Work (Gulf of Mexico)*, *World Flag*, and *crystalline work (arctic) 20.2.17.1*." ] } ], "body_markdown": "John Gerrard makes worlds, not pictures. Since the early 2000s his medium has been the real-time game engine, the same software that renders video games, turned to a wholly different purpose: slow, exacting simulations of real sites that run live, in step with the sun and the seasons, with no beginning and no end. The subject underneath nearly all of them is energy, and the power it buys. He arrives in the AB[500] not as a painter trying on a new tool but as an artist who has spent twenty years arguing that the simulation is the native art form of the petroleum century.\n\n## The game engine as a stage\n\nGerrard trained as a sculptor (the Ruskin at Oxford, then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College Dublin), and a residency at Ars Electronica in Linz put a team of programmers and a game engine in front of him. His first developed engine work, *One Thousand Year Dawn* (2005), shows a young man on a beach watching a sunrise that the code will take a thousand years to complete. Time becomes a sculptural material. He came to think of the engine as a stage, with the sun as an actor that can be told to rise over ten seconds or ten centuries in a single line of code.\n\nThe lineage he names runs through Bruce Nauman and the minimalists: resolved, hermetic objects placed on a platform and left to perform. What follows that first work, the *Smoke Trees*, the *Dust Storms*, the *Grow Finish Units* and the Google *Farms*, are all portraits of industrial systems most people never see. Gerrard insists they are not films. \"This is information,\" he says, \"this is not image, this is not a record.\" You are watching data, rendered frame by frame and discarded, the way the real flows of capital and energy move and vanish.\n\n## Western Flag and the petromodern\n\nThe work that carried Gerrard to the broadest public is *Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas)* (2017), commissioned by Channel 4 for Earth Day. It rebuilds the site of the 1901 Lucas Gusher, the first great American oil strike, now barren, and plants in it a flagpole streaming black smoke: an invisible gas, carbon dioxide, given an image and a banner. Gerrard calls it an invisible sculpture and a flag of mourning for the Anthropocene. It has since stood at Somerset House, in Madrid, in Hamburg, and at Desert X in the Coachella Valley.\n\nAround the same flag idea grew the *Flags* series: simulations of gasoline spreading across the surface of major rivers, the Danube, the Amazon, the Nile, the Yangtze. Working with his programmer Helmut Bressler, Gerrard modelled the iridescent sheen of oil on water with a thin-film refraction algorithm, the same physics that makes a petrol rainbow in a puddle. The result is a beauty he calls a toxic sublimity: the allure of petroleum and its danger held in one image.\n\n## Petro National\n\n*Petro National* (2022, Art Blocks × Pace, 196 editions) takes that algorithm on-chain. Each of the 196 works is a nation or region rendered as a gasoline spill on the world ocean, its thickness and iridescence set by that country's per-capita petroleum consumption: thin and blue-green for the low consumers, thick and lustrous for the high. Each world runs on the local time of its capital, with its own seasons. It was Gerrard's first WebGL piece, a spatial, temporal world placed directly in the browser, and the first Web3 project in the Art Blocks and Pace Verso collaboration. In 2023, *Petro National #16 (Nigeria)* entered the collection of the Centre Pompidou.\n\n## World Flag\n\n*World Flag* (2023, 195 editions) reimagines the national flag as a banner of coloured virtual smoke, each one sited in a fictitious future desert. The premise is bleak: the state as a ghost of itself, the flag a militaristic sign for a doomed, place-based order. All 195 are generated from a single 112 KB script stored on-chain, using WebGL so the worlds render directly in a phone or a browser, post place, post geography. The works were released in the order of their countries' greenhouse-gas emissions, highest to lowest, and Gerrard dedicated a tenth of his proceeds to Hometree, the nonprofit restoring temperate rainforest on Ireland's Atlantic coast.\n\nThe two AB[500] works are bookends of a single argument. *Petro National* reflects what each nation burns; *World Flag* ranks what each nation emits. Together they turn the most ordinary instruments of the state, the flag and the fuel gauge, into a ledger of the climate crisis, written in code that will keep running for as long as the chain does.\n\n## SPIRITS and the browser as public space\n\nGerrard's current work pushes the same instinct further into everyday screens. *SPIRITS* (2025–26), presented by the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, is a year-long, browser-based solo that unfolds across the four solstices and equinoxes. He gathers plastic sandals washed up on beaches around four great bodies of water, photoscans each into a high-resolution Gaussian splat, and lets you turn the object on a touchscreen until it reveals what it is made of: solidified petroleum, the oil age washed back ashore. He argues the browser is now the most important site we have for public art, and the touchscreen a cultural superpower artists have been locked out of.\n\nLACMA describes 96 recovered sandals and shoes, released one per hour across four 24-hour events: Pacific on 21 December 2025, Indian Ocean on 20 March 2026, Mediterranean on 21 June, and Atlantic on 22 September. Viewers can drag the scanned objects and press to transform their surfaces with oil slicks or ocean currents. The seasonal rhythm joins the work's ecological subject to a form of public participation that happens through touch.\n\nWriting for Art Basel on 22 September 2026, Gerrard develops this argument through the touchscreen, where audiences can manipulate spatial images rather than merely scroll past them. He describes *SPIRITS* as the result of sustained human judgement and weeks of iteration with programmers, even where AI assists the process. His preferred term, “art token,” connects that practice to *Petro National* and *World Flag*: the token brings a work's identity, provenance and software together. For the flag triptych at Zero 10, he reports assigning tokens to existing software editions, with access through a token-gated archive being established. The browser and the token serve different parts of the same project: public encounter and a durable structure for collecting software.\n\n> I suspect the game engine is the most important medium of these times.\n\n## Art Basel Zero 10\n\nIn June 2026 the argument reached the largest stage. **Zero 10**, Art Basel's initiative for the art of the digital era, made its Basel debut from 17 to 21 June 2026, co-curated by the artist Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman under the theme *The Condition*, which traces seven decades of instruction-based and computational art. Gerrard showed *Western Flag*, *Flare (Oceania)* and *Standard* with Fellowship, and during the opening sales his *STANDARD* (2023), a simulation of a white flag rising from desert water vapour, sold for USD 500,000. On 21 June, the longest day, the *SPIRITS* summer-solstice phase launched with a dance at LACMA led by the electronic musician Richie Hawtin.\n\n## Why he belongs in the AB[500]\n\nThe AB[500] records the first five hundred Art Blocks projects, the moment generative art assembled its canon on-chain. Gerrard is among the few in that set who came to it already established in the museum world (Tate, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn, IMMA, M+) and chose the blockchain anyway, because WebGL let him put a living, spatial world in anyone's pocket. *Petro National* and *World Flag* are not a blue-chip artist dabbling in NFTs; they are the logical next move for a practice that always wanted the broadest possible public and the most direct possible image of power. That is why they sit in the set, and why they read as foundational.\n\nMOTZKO's digital art collection adds a collector-side record of that practice through holdings of *Smoke Hands*, *Petro National*, *Bone Work (Gulf of Mexico)*, *World Flag*, and *crystalline work (arctic) 20.2.17.1*.", "images": [ { "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x64780ce53f6e966e18a22af13a2f97369580ec11/16.png", "title": "Petro National #16 (Nigeria)", "caption": "Gerrard, 2022 · Centre Pompidou", "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders" }, { "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0x64780ce53f6e966e18a22af13a2f97369580ec11/0.png", "title": "Petro National #0", "caption": "Gerrard, 2022", "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders" }, { "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xea698596b6009a622c3ed00dd5a8b5d1cae4fc36/6000000.png", "title": "World Flag #0", "caption": "Gerrard, 2023", "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders" }, { "url": "https://media-proxy.artblocks.io/1/0xea698596b6009a622c3ed00dd5a8b5d1cae4fc36/6000050.png", "title": "World Flag #50", "caption": "Gerrard, 2023", "rights": "Not CC0 - Art Blocks render, property of the artist/holders" } ], "references": [ { "n": 1, "note": "John Gerrard, official website: a chronological record of the simulation works, with exhibitions and biography.", "url": "https://www.johngerrard.net/", "label": "johngerrard.net" }, { "n": 2, "note": "Le Random, John Gerrard on Ecology, Technology & Power (Peter Bauman, June 2026): One Thousand Year Dawn (2005), the engine as a stage, and the sun told to rise over a thousand years.", "url": "https://www.lerandom.art/editorial/john-gerrard-on-ecology-technology-power", "label": "lerandom.art" }, { "n": 3, "note": "Sean Capone in conversation with John Gerrard, Pace Gallery, New York, July 2022 (the Endling exhibition): Nauman and minimalism, the Smoke Trees and Dust Storms, and \"this is information, this is not image.\"", "url": "https://www.seancapone.com/key-frames/john-gerrard", "label": "seancapone.com" }, { "n": 4, "note": "TBA21 collection, Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017: the Channel 4 Earth Day commission, the Lucas Gusher, and the work as an invisible sculpture and warning of climate change.", "url": "https://tba21.org/WesternFlag", "label": "tba21.org/WesternFlag" }, { "n": 5, "note": "Desert X 2019, Western Flag installed at the gateway to the Coachella Valley as a reminder of resource exploitation.", "url": "https://desertx.org/dx/desert-x-19/john-gerrard", "label": "desertx.org" }, { "n": 6, "note": "The Nomad Magazine, The Power of Oil (Kimberly Bradley): the Flags series, gasoline on the Danube, Amazon, Nile and Yangtze, the thin-film refraction algorithm built with Helmut Bressler, and \"toxic sublimity.\"", "url": "https://www.the-nomad-magazine.com/john-gerrard-the-power-of-oil/", "label": "the-nomad-magazine.com" }, { "n": 7, "note": "Petro National by John Gerrard on Art Blocks (Art Blocks × Pace, 196 editions, 2022): 196 nations as gasoline spills set by per-capita petroleum consumption, the first WebGL piece online and on-chain, with production by Werner Poetzelberger and Helmut Bressler.", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/petro-national-by-john-gerrard", "label": "artblocks.io" }, { "n": 8, "note": "World Flag by John Gerrard on Art Blocks (195 editions, 2023): 195 flags in coloured virtual smoke from one 112 KB on-chain WebGL script, released by greenhouse-gas rank, with 10% of proceeds to Hometree; the page also records that Western Flag (NFT) (2021) was the first NFT acquired by LACMA and that Petro National #16 (Nigeria) entered the Centre Pompidou in 2023.", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/world-flag-by-john-gerrard", "label": "artblocks.io" }, { "n": 9, "note": "Le Random, John Gerrard on Ecology, Technology & Power: SPIRITS at LACMA, the beach-sandal Gaussian splats, the browser as public art, and the summer-solstice dance with Richie Hawtin on 21 June 2026.", "url": "https://www.lerandom.art/editorial/john-gerrard-on-ecology-technology-power", "label": "lerandom.art" }, { "n": 10, "note": "LACMA, john gerrard: SPIRITS, the year-long browser-based work presented by the Art + Technology Lab.", "url": "https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/john-gerrard-spirits", "label": "lacma.org" }, { "n": 11, "note": "John Gerrard, Are touchscreens the next art frontier? Digital pioneer John Gerrard thinks so, Art Basel, 22 September 2026: touch, art tokens, human iteration and the final seasonal chapter of SPIRITS.", "url": "https://www.artbasel.com/stories/john-gerrard-touch-tokens-next-digital-art-lacma", "label": "artbasel.com" }, { "n": 12, "note": "Art Basel, on the launch of Zero 10, the initiative for the art of the digital era, making its Swiss debut co-curated by Trevor Paglen and Eli Scheinman under the theme The Condition.", "url": "https://www.artbasel.com/stories/art-basel-launches-zero-10--a-new-initiative-for-art-of-the-digital-era", "label": "artbasel.com" }, { "n": 13, "note": "Art Basel, on the opening sales of Art Basel 2026: John Gerrard's STANDARD (2023), a real-time simulation of a white flag rising from desert water vapour, sold by Fellowship for USD 500,000.", "url": "https://www.artbasel.com/stories/art-basel-2026-strong-sales-opening", "label": "artbasel.com" }, { "n": 14, "note": "Phileas, A conversation with John Gerrard (Vienna, March 2023): biography (born 1974, Tipperary; BFA Oxford 1997, MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago 2000), representation by Pace Gallery, and collections including Tate, MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, the Hirshhorn, IMMA and M+.", "url": "https://www.phileas.art/public-programme/talk/johngerrard", "label": "phileas.art" }, { "n": 15, "note": "MOTZKO, John Gerrard collection page: holdings across five simulation and generative works.", "url": "https://motzko.net/artist/john-gerrard", "label": "motzko.net" } ], "bibliography": [ { "category": "Works & the artist's own sites", "entries": [ { "note": "Official website: a chronological record of the simulation works, with exhibitions and biography.", "url": "https://www.johngerrard.net/", "label": "johngerrard.net", "meta": "artist site" }, { "note": "The artist's biography page: academic training, solo exhibitions, collections, and a selected media and press list.", "url": "https://www.johngerrard.net/bio/", "label": "johngerrard.net/bio", "meta": "artist site" }, { "note": "The dedicated Western Flag site, on the 2017 Spindletop simulation commissioned by Channel 4.", "url": "http://westernflag.johngerrard.net/", "label": "westernflag.johngerrard.net", "meta": "work · 2017" } ] }, { "category": "In the AB[500]: Art Blocks", "entries": [ { "note": "Petro National on Art Blocks: 196 nations as generative gasoline spills on the world ocean, 196 editions, Art Blocks × Pace, 2022.", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/petro-national-by-john-gerrard", "label": "artblocks.io/collection/petro-national", "meta": "collection · 2022" }, { "note": "World Flag on Art Blocks: 195 national flags in coloured virtual smoke, released by greenhouse-gas rank, 195 editions, Art Blocks × Pace, 2023.", "url": "https://www.artblocks.io/collection/world-flag-by-john-gerrard", "label": "artblocks.io/collection/world-flag", "meta": "collection · 2023" }, { "note": "Pace Gallery journal on Petro National, the first Web3 project in the Art Blocks and Pace Verso collaboration.", "url": "https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/john-gerrard-petro-national/", "label": "pacegallery.com/journal (petro national)", "meta": "gallery · 2022" }, { "note": "Pace Gallery journal on World Flag and its on-chain release.", "url": "https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/john-gerrard-world-flag", "label": "pacegallery.com/journal (world flag)", "meta": "gallery · 2023" } ] }, { "category": "Museums & institutions", "entries": [ { "note": "SPIRITS, Gerrard's year-long, browser-based solo presented by the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, comprising 96 scanned sandals and shoes across four seasonal events from December 2025 to September 2026, culminating in the Atlantic chapter on 22 September.", "url": "https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/john-gerrard-spirits", "label": "lacma.org (SPIRITS)", "meta": "museum · 2026" }, { "note": "LACMA Unframed on the spring-equinox phase of SPIRITS, the Indian Ocean works rising on the museum's homepage.", "url": "https://unframed.lacma.org/2026/03/19/tipping-points-john-gerrard-indian-ocean-spirits-rise-spring-equinox", "label": "unframed.lacma.org", "meta": "museum · 2026" }, { "note": "TBA21 collection entry on Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), 2017, the work as an \"invisible sculpture\" and warning of climate change.", "url": "https://tba21.org/WesternFlag", "label": "tba21.org/WesternFlag", "meta": "collection · 2017" } ] }, { "category": "Galleries & exhibitions", "entries": [ { "note": "Pace Gallery journal announcing that John Gerrard had joined the gallery's program.", "url": "https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/john-gerrard-joins-pace-gallery/", "label": "pacegallery.com/journal (joins Pace)", "meta": "gallery" }, { "note": "Desert X 2019, Western Flag installed at the gateway to the Coachella Valley as a reminder of resource exploitation.", "url": "https://desertx.org/dx/desert-x-19/john-gerrard", "label": "desertx.org", "meta": "exhibition · 2019" }, { "note": "Phileas (Vienna), A conversation with John Gerrard with curator Anna Hugo, on the occasion of Leaf Work, March 2023.", "url": "https://www.phileas.art/public-programme/talk/johngerrard", "label": "phileas.art", "meta": "talk · 2023" } ] }, { "category": "Interviews", "entries": [ { "note": "Art Basel, Are touchscreens the next art frontier? Digital pioneer John Gerrard thinks so: Gerrard on digital touch, art tokens, human judgement in software production, and the Atlantic chapter of SPIRITS.", "url": "https://www.artbasel.com/stories/john-gerrard-touch-tokens-next-digital-art-lacma", "label": "artbasel.com (touchscreens and art tokens)", "meta": "artist perspective · 22 September 2026" }, { "note": "Le Random, John Gerrard on Ecology, Technology & Power, with Peter Bauman: SPIRITS, Zero 10, and why he believes the game engine is the most important medium of our time.", "url": "https://www.lerandom.art/editorial/john-gerrard-on-ecology-technology-power", "label": "lerandom.art", "meta": "interview · 2026" }, { "note": "Right Click Save, The Interview: generative sound, algorithmic geometry, and ecological-restoration partnerships in the crystalline work.", "url": "https://www.rightclicksave.com/article/the-interview-john-gerrard-crystalline-work", "label": "rightclicksave.com", "meta": "interview" }, { "note": "Sean Capone in conversation with Gerrard at Pace, July 2022 (on the Endling show): the game engine as stage, \"this is information, not image,\" and Petro National.", "url": "https://www.seancapone.com/key-frames/john-gerrard", "label": "seancapone.com", "meta": "interview · 2022" }, { "note": "The Nomad Magazine, The Power of Oil, with Kimberly Bradley: the Flags series, the thin-film refraction algorithm, and the toxic sublimity of petroleum.", "url": "https://www.the-nomad-magazine.com/john-gerrard-the-power-of-oil/", "label": "the-nomad-magazine.com", "meta": "interview" } ] }, { "category": "Press & criticism", "entries": [ { "note": "ARTnews on Gerrard dedicating proceeds from his generative work to restoring Ireland's temperate rainforest with Hometree.", "url": "https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/john-gerrard-generative-art-ireland-rainforest-1234711212/", "label": "artnews.com", "meta": "press" }, { "note": "Artforum review of John Gerrard, on the simulations and their real-time logic.", "url": "https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201102/john-gerrard-38844", "label": "artforum.com", "meta": "press · 2011" } ] }, { "category": "Profiles & archives", "entries": [ { "note": "Wikipedia entry on the Irish artist, biography, works, and collections.", "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gerrard_(artist)", "label": "wikipedia.org", "meta": "profile" }, { "note": "Ocula artist profile: biography, works for sale, and exhibition history.", "url": "https://ocula.com/artists/john-gerrard/", "label": "ocula.com", "meta": "profile" }, { "note": "Artnet artist page: market record, exhibitions, and bibliography.", "url": "https://www.artnet.com/artists/john-gerrard/", "label": "artnet.com", "meta": "profile" }, { "note": "Artsy artist profile: biography, CV, and works.", "url": "https://www.artsy.net/artist/john-gerrard", "label": "artsy.net", "meta": "profile" }, { "note": "MOTZKO documents five collected works by Gerrard, including Petro National, World Flag, and Smoke Hands.", "url": "https://motzko.net/artist/john-gerrard", "label": "John Gerrard at MOTZKO", "meta": "collection archive · ongoing" } ] }, { "category": "Video", "entries": [ { "note": "TateShots: John Gerrard on Western Flag and the real-time simulation behind it.", "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCVCqbqwSN0", "label": "youtube.com", "meta": "video" }, { "note": "Alejandro Cartagena's eleven-minute documentary interview with Gerrard for Fellowship, on making art with the tools of today and his claim that computing power is the most contemporary tool an artist has.", "url": "https://x.com/halecar2/status/2067594611896222047", "label": "x.com (Fellowship documentary)", "meta": "video · 2026" } ] } ], "provenance": { "schema": "ab5d-provenance/1", "contributor": "ab500dao.eth", "agent": "Cowork", "model": "Claude Opus 4.8", "harness": "Claude Cowork", "models_aux": [ "Grok", "NotebookLM" ], "autonomy": "supervised", "effort": { "sources_fetched": 12, "revisions": 2 }, "tokens": { "input": 600000, "output": 50000, "estimated": true }, "cost_usd": null, "links_verified": 26, "date": "2026-06-18", "note": "In-house dossier produced in Claude Cowork under human direction; token counts estimated, not instrumented." }, "license": "https://ab5d.xyz/license/", "license_note": "Dossier prose is CC0. Embedded Art Blocks renders are not: they remain the property of their respective artists and holders.", "attribution": { "name": "AB[500]", "url": "https://ab5d.xyz/artists/john-gerrard/", "cite": "AB5D, \"John Gerrard\", AB[500] artist dossier, ab5d.xyz, 2026", "required": false, "requested": true, "note": "Prose is CC0; a credit and link back to ab5d.xyz is appreciated, not required." }, "generated": "2026-09-23T08:40:15" }