Petro National

The work and its context

Petro National is project 0 on the Art Blocks x Pace contract 0x64780ce53f6e966e18a22af13a2f97369580ec11. The index records 196 invocations against a maximum of 196, the runtime babylon@5.0.0, a square aspect ratio and the licence label CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ¹. Because it is project 0 on its own contract, each token id equals its mint number: the AB5D holding is token 60, Nepal ¹.

The artist's text calls it "196 nations and regions realised as gasoline spills on the world ocean" ¹. Each country's outline floats as a thin film of fuel. Its thickness follows that country's per capita oil consumption, from a faint blue-green trace to a thick, lustrous and highly iridescent form ¹². Gerrard frames the premise in one line: "Society consumes 100 million barrels of oil every day with radically differing patterns between global north and south" ¹.

It was the first release of the partnership between Pace Verso, Pace Gallery's Web3 arm, and Art Blocks ²³. Art Blocks founder Erick Calderon said the project "literally gave me goosebumps" ⁴. A single work, #16 (Nigeria), has since entered the Centre Pompidou ⁵.

Conception and development

Gerrard, born in Dublin in 1974, has worked for two decades with real-time simulation built in game engines ⁶¹. His best-known pieces are portraits of sites of energy and industry, such as Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) (2014) and Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) (2017) ⁶. The Petro National text names Western Flag as its precedent and describes the new work as "a first webgl piece both online and onchain" ¹.

His own project page says energy consumption "has become a signifier of political power" ⁷. It credits "a custom thin-film refraction algorithm, which reproduces the phenomenon of iridescence" ⁷². The production team is named in the project record: Werner Poetzelberger as producer and Helmut Bressler as programmer ¹.

Two further ideas carry over from the game-engine works. First, each world keeps real time. It runs "on local time as dictated by the time zone of its capital city", so night, day and the seasons pass across the year ¹. Second, the works are spatial: the viewer can drag to look around, press R to rotate slowly, O and P to zoom, and G for full screen ¹. Pace's own video, "john gerrard's Petro National NFT Series", presents the project in the artist's words ⁸.

How the work was constructed

The program is five script parts that concatenate to 46,905 bytes, SHA-256 1605a0e82d4409a9c6b368a050f12d34b2c07c54f05151b9594a994d903781e4. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full. No code is reproduced here ¹.

About a third of the file is a compact table of 196 encoded country outlines. Each entry also carries a latitude and longitude and a single consumption value ¹. The rest is a Babylon.js scene built from custom shaders (code reading) ¹:

• Allocation. A fixed-seed shuffle of the 196 entries is indexed by mint number. The country therefore depends only on mint order, not on the token hash. My re-implementation in Python reproduces all 196 published country labels as distinct entries, one per token ¹.
• The slick. The outline is turned into a signed distance field on a 256-pixel grid. A shader converts it into a film thickness, and a thin-film colour table maps thickness and viewing angle to iridescent colour.
• The sea. Up to six Gerstner waves displace a 512-by-512 grid. A procedural normal map adds ripples, and a sky dome is computed with Rayleigh and Mie scattering and drifting clouds.
• The sun. A solar-position routine uses the viewer's real clock and the country's stored coordinates. The camera turns to face the sun while it is above the horizon.

The consumption value is clamped between 0 and 1 and split at 0.09 and 0.53 into three bands. Every visual trait follows from the band, as a check against all 196 tokens confirms ¹:

Within a band, the stored value still varies the film's thickness curve and the wave amplitude ¹. The hash has a smaller role. It sets the direction of the wave field, an offset of up to an hour in the animation clock, a shift of up to two steps in the deep-water tint, and a small jitter on the outline's distance field (code reading) ¹. This is what the artist's text means when it says the traits are "further affected by the minting seed address" ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

A full read of the program, checked against all 196 token records, turned up the following.

1. Uzbekistan borrows Vanuatu's sun. The coordinates stored for Uzbekistan (#155) are identical to those for Vanuatu (#4): about 168.3° E, 17.7° S, near Port Vila. The outline is Uzbekistan's, and its time-zone trait reads 5. Yet its sky follows the day and night of the South Pacific, about six and a half hours ahead of Tashkent in solar time ¹. No other country is displaced this way. Tonga and Samoa only look odd because of the date line.
2. Local time is solar time, not time zone. The text speaks of capital-city time zones, but the code never reads a time zone. It computes the sun's position from longitude and latitude (code reading) ¹. For most countries the difference is small.
3. Thirty countries share one maximum. Clamping means everything above about 550 gallons per capita renders at the same top value. The United States (902), Saudi Arabia (1,507), Singapore (3,679), Belgium, Norway, Qatar and 24 others are indistinguishable on this measure ¹. The share-of-world-total trait, in which the United States accounts for 20.49 per cent, plays no part in the image ¹.
4. A special case for the United States. Only one entry, the United States, gets its own geometry rule. Its outline, which includes Alaska and outlying islands, is enlarged by 1.3 and shifted to fit the grid (code reading) ¹.
5. "Stormy" skies are not stormier. The cloud density is a fixed constant for every token. The sky's noise settings differ between the low band and the other two, not between cloudy and stormy. What sets the stormy (high) band apart is a flag that darkens the slick's colour where the sky noise is low (code reading) ¹.
6. "Strong" waves are lower. The high band uses a smaller amplitude scale than the other bands. It gets steeper waves and two extra short wave trains, so the surface reads as choppier rather than taller (code reading) ¹.
7. A short pi. The shared shader header defines pi as 3.1459 rather than 3.14159. The value is used in the cloud layer and in the viewing-angle term of the thin-film lookup (code reading) ¹.
8. Leftovers. A sky uniform is set on every frame but never read by the shader. A sampler for a second sky cube map is declared and never bound, and a constant (78) sits unused in the settings object that holds the consumption value. The project number is computed and not used. The animation clock resets after 30 hours of continuous running (code reading) ¹.

The most coveted variants

Petro National has no rarity ladder in the usual sense. Every country appears once, and the three visual bands map onto consumption, so collectors choose by country and by what the country says ¹². Charlotte Kent describes the sheen as "epitomizing the colorful consumer lifestyle enabled by extractive capitalism" ⁹. Artnet summed up the work's irony: "the bigger the polluter, the greater the beauty" ¹⁰.

The heavy consumers. The high band holds 63 tokens, including the largest absolute consumers: the United States (#8), Japan (#7), Russia (#195), Saudi Arabia (#78) and Korea (#100) ¹. These are the thick, lustrous slicks. China (#56) and India (#26) are the second- and third-largest users by share of the world total, at 13.31 and 4.62 per cent. Because the image follows per capita use, China sits in the middle band and India, at 49 gallons, in the low band ¹.

The Pompidou work. #16, Nigeria, a low-band slick, was bought by the Centre Pompidou in 2023, inventory number AM 2023-805. It is on loan to the exhibition "La mer est ton miroir" at the Abbaye Saint-Germain, Auxerre, from 20 June to 1 November 2026 ⁵. The museum's notice says the series explores the distribution of wealth and power ⁵. Artsy lists #16 and #79 (Austria) as offered by museum in progress, Vienna ¹¹.

The thinnest films. The low band's 50 tokens are almost invisible: Burundi (#2) and Chad (#106) at 2 gallons per capita, Malawi and Somalia at 5 ¹. The AB5D holding belongs here. Nepal (#60) records 23 gallons per capita and 0.0447 per cent of the world total, with weak waves, a green ocean and cloudy skies ¹. In the proxy snapshot the film is a faint smear on dark water. Since the lighting follows the real sun over Kathmandu, a darker frame may reflect the hour of capture (code reading) ¹.

Early and artist-held tokens. Invocation 0, Jamaica, was minted on 3 June 2022 and remains in the artist's wallet. That wallet also holds #45, #142, #149 and #191 ¹. Artnet reported that Pace "purchased five works and displayed them at the opening" ¹². No source inspected names the wallet that holds them. The largest single holder has 11 tokens, all middle- and low-band countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific ¹.

Physical exhibitions and World Flag

Exhibitions

Petro National has lived in galleries as screens and projections rather than as prints:

• Pace, New York, June 2022. Works were shown at 540 West 25th Street during NFT.NYC, 21 to 23 June, as the release went live ⁴¹³. On 28 June Gerrard's solo show "Endling" opened at Pace, with Flare (Oceania), Endling (Martha) and washington.stream ¹⁴.
• museum in progress, Vienna, 2023. Petro National was the first work on the online platform "digital mip" and the first stage of its "raising flags" project, curated by Alois Herrmann and Kaspar Mühlemann Hartl ¹⁵. Artsy dates the presentation 12 August to 31 October 2023 ¹⁶.
• HERE, London, November 2023. VERSE showed Petro National at 9 Cork Street on 25 and 26 November 2023, as part of its HERE programme ¹⁷.
• Centre Pompidou, 2023 onwards. #16 was acquired in 2023 and is on show in Auxerre until 1 November 2026 ⁵.

World Flag, the sequel

A year later, on 28 June 2023, Gerrard released World Flag on the same partnership, project 6 on the contract 0xea698596b6009a622c3ed00dd5a8b5d1cae4fc36 ¹⁸¹⁰. The two works make a pair:

• Subject. Petro National shows countries as oil on water. World Flag shows "195 national flags rendered in coloured virtual smoke", each in a procedurally generated desert ¹⁹. Gerrard called these "future deserts", a world "we are hurtling towards by burning 100 million barrels of oil a day" ¹⁰. The same figure opens the Petro National text ¹.
• Data. Petro National uses per capita oil consumption and allocates countries by a shuffled mint order ¹. World Flag uses ClimateWatch's 2019 greenhouse gas figures and releases flags from the highest emitter to the lowest, from China to Fiji, whatever the population ¹⁹¹⁰.
• Scope. Petro National has 196 nations and regions, including Taiwan, Palestine and the Vatican ⁹. World Flag has the 195 UN member states ¹⁹.
• Engine and sale. Both are WebGL worlds with true solar lighting. World Flag's single script is 112 KB against Petro National's 46.9 KB ¹⁹¹. World Flag was sold by Dutch auction from 11 ETH ²⁰.
• Giving. Petro National gave 25 per cent of the artist's proceeds to climate causes. World Flag gives 10 per cent to Hometree, an Irish rainforest charity ¹¹⁹.

Adam Kleinman reads the flag works as chapters in a single account of fossil-fuel dependence, running from Western Flag into an imagined future ²¹. Western Flag (NFT) (2021) entered LACMA as a gift of the artist, accession M.2023.148 ²². World Flag was shown with Anna Barlik at Nguyen Wahed, New York, from 17 July to 27 August 2026 ²³.

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 3 June 2022 at 17:44:19 UTC ¹. The index records activation on 7 June and a start time of 14:00 UTC on 21 June, which is 10 am in New York, matching Pace's announced release time ¹². The first public mints came at 15:30:22 UTC, when eight tokens were minted in the same minute. The 196th was minted at 15:52:32 UTC ¹.

The timing fits the descending auction announced for the release ¹³. Only 41 tokens were minted in the first 20 minutes, 15:30 to 15:49. Then 140 were minted in the last two minutes, 15:51 and 15:52, as buyers waited for the price to fall (my computation from the index) ¹. Katya Kazakina reported that the works "sold out in 20 minutes, with prices ranging from 2 ETH to 5 ETH" ¹². The index's price field now reads 0, and its lowest listing at retrieval was 0.888 ETH ¹. At retrieval the 196 tokens were held by 124 addresses ¹.

The project text says "25% of artist's proceeds support atmospheric CO2 removal" and the rest goes to regenerative farming organisations ¹. Contemporary reports named Climeworks ¹³. The Pace announcement, however, names HomeTree in Ireland and Asociación Campo Adentro's Shepherd School in Spain ².

Copyright and licensing

The index records CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 without a link ¹. On that label, the images may be shared non-commercially with attribution, but not adapted. The "no derivatives" term is stricter than the licences of most Art Blocks projects of the period. The program carries no separate code licence, and Babylon.js is loaded by the platform at view time ¹. The still from johngerrard.net belongs to the artist's studio. It is linked, not re-hosted, and needs permission for reuse beyond reference.

Significance and limitations

Petro National brought a leading real-time simulation artist, and a blue-chip gallery, onto Art Blocks. It remains one of the platform's clearest uses of data as subject ³². Its structure is unusual. There are no rare traits, only countries, and the three visual bands encode a political measure directly. A national museum has bought one output ⁵. The code also shows the limits of that data: thirty countries share a single ceiling, and one country's sky belongs to another hemisphere ¹. The earlier AB5D essay said the lighting followed each capital's time zone. The code shows it follows solar position ²⁴¹.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Was Uzbekistan's coordinate entry an error, and does the artist know of it? Which dataset and year supplied the consumption figures?
2. Kazakina's dollar figures ($2,411 to $3,617) do not match her 2 to 5 ETH range at June 2022 prices ¹². What were the auction's start, step and resting prices?
3. Which charities received the proceeds: Climeworks, HomeTree, Campo Adentro, or all three? Which wallet holds the five works Pace bought?
4. Several quotations here came through automated page extraction and should be checked against the originals, especially Kent's Outland essay, whose headline was extracted as "Manual Override".
5. Were any outputs shown as physical screens in Vienna, or only online, and what exactly was shown in London?

Bibliography