World Flag

The work and its context

World Flag is project 6 on the Art Blocks x Pace (V3) contract, 0xea698596b6009a622c3ed00dd5a8b5d1cae4fc36. The index records 195 invocations against a maximum of 195, the runtime babylon@5.0.0, an aspect ratio of 1 and the licence label CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ¹. The project text describes "195 national flags rendered in coloured virtual smoke". Each flag stands in "a fictitious future desert", and "Dawn breaks and night falls accurately for the locale that each flag represents" ¹.

The flags were released in a fixed order: the 2019 ClimateWatch greenhouse gas estimates, from highest emitter to lowest, "irrespective of population size" ¹. The sale began with China, the United States and India and ended with Fiji. Decrypt called Fiji the "world's only carbon-negative country" ². Gerrard pledged 10 per cent of the artist's proceeds to Hometree, which is restoring temperate rainforest in Ireland ¹. Programming is credited to Helmut Bressler and production to Werner Poetzelberger ¹³.

The piece follows two earlier Gerrard works on the blockchain. Western Flag (NFT), released in 2021, was the first work by a Pace artist to be issued as an NFT. Petro National, in 2022, was the first project of the Art Blocks and Pace Verso collaboration ¹. AB5D holds #194, Fiji ¹.

Conception and development

World Flag belongs to a family of smoke-flag simulations that Gerrard has built with the same team since 2017. In a 2017 interview he asked: "Have you ever tried sculpting smoke?" He also said that "This piece may look like cinema, but it's not, it's military simulation" ⁴. Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 raises a flag of black smoke over the exhausted site of the 1901 "Lucas Gusher". The simulation "runs in exact parallel with the real site throughout the year" ⁵. World Flag takes that idea, a live solar simulation of a real place, and repeats it once for every recognised state.

At launch Gerrard told Artnet that the deserts show "a hot lifeless world we are hurtling towards by burning 100 million barrels of oil a day" ⁶. To Decrypt he said, "If we keep gathering together under these national flags and competing across borders, we're not going to deal with climate change." He added: "The browser is probably the most important public art space we have right now" ². Adam Kleinman's essay for Pace, published five days before the sale, describes "an edition of 195 + 1 Artist's Proof (AP)". It says the work was "intended to be viewed more intimately on a smartphone, laptop, or mobile device" ⁷. The project record says the AP would be a composite of all 195 flags, minted only upon donation to an institution ¹.

How the work was constructed

The program is six script parts that concatenate to 112,054 bytes, SHA-256 047abcb0404aff8599a21e5260d59316c6c7db7686c1f73dff4a5f8ebe7eccb6. It was retrieved from the Art Blocks index on 20 September 2026 and read in full ¹. Most of it is GLSL shader source for terrain, sand ripples, pebbles, mud cracks, a physically based lighting model, a Rayleigh and Mie scattering sky, and stars ¹.

The embedded data. About 26,000 characters, roughly 23 per cent of the script, are a compact flag atlas written in a 91-symbol text code (code reading). Five colour tables hold 378 colours in all, a table gives each country's offset, and a 24,144-character stream stores every flag as a tiny pixel image, run-length coded where that saves space. Each record also carries a latitude, a longitude and a stripe count. Decoding all 195 records shows how small the images are: France, Italy and Indonesia are 3 by 2 pixels, Yemen is 5 by 3, China is 81 by 54, and Venezuela uses 27 colours (own computation) ¹. The script contains no emissions or population data. Those traits come from Art Blocks' feature layer, not from the program ¹.

The seed. The token hash seeds two small generators, which are first run a million times and then alternated. The country is not drawn from the hash. It is the mint number modulo 195, so the release order fixed which flag each token would carry ¹. From the hash the program draws a desert type, a colour and sky, whether the pole stands on a raised hill, and many scene details: fog, dune rotation, the far terrain's outline, pebble and crack patterns, and the flag's wind (code reading).

I re-implemented the first draws in the program and ran them against all 195 hashes. They reproduce every published Desert, Colour and Sky Condition label exactly (own computation) ¹.

Mud Flats came out below their weight (42 against about 58 expected) and Clear skies above it (75 against about 63). Both differences are chance in the hashes, not a change in the code (own computation) ¹.

The flag. Each flag is a particle system of up to 16,384 sprites of animated smoke, released from rows of emitters on the pole. The "Flag density" trait is the stripe count stored with each flag. The program multiplies it by six to get the number of emitter rows, from 60 for Guinea to 234 for the United States ¹. Each particle takes its colour at birth from the flag image, and the column it samples moves with time. The flag's design therefore scrolls out from the pole in a loop instead of standing still (code reading).

The sun. Every frame, the program reads the viewer's clock and computes the sun's position at the flag's stored coordinates, using a standard low-precision solar formula (code reading). Sky colour, twilight, stars, shadows, fog and the glow of the pole at night all follow from that position. The decoded coordinates look like capitals, not geographic centres. China, for example, is placed at 116°E, 40.6°N (own computation) ¹. The camera orbits at a fixed height. Dragging turns the view, and the F, R and M keys and screen-edge taps work as the project text describes ¹.

Quirks in the algorithm

1. Yemen goes first. Invocation 0 is Yemen. It was minted on 1 June 2023 at 16:05:47 UTC, five days before the project was activated and 27 days before the sale. At retrieval it sat in the artist's wallet ¹. By its 2019 figure (25.26 MtCO2e), Yemen would rank 119th in the release order. Every one of invocations 1 to 194 follows the emissions ranking without a break (own computation) ¹. The mint number sets the country, so the first flag was bound to be whatever occupied slot 0 of the atlas.
2. "Ash" is not a desert in the code. The program has three terrain types. "Ash" is the name given to sandy scenes with the black or white ground colour ¹. The type labelled "Gravel" uses the pebble shader and mountain horizon, yet its four colours are all called "Mud". Meanwhile the real mud-crack terrain ("Mud Flat") has colours called Pale, Reddish, Brown and Salty (code reading).
3. Rules that hold in every token. Every Ash and every Salty output is Dusty. This is by construction: the code gives both a hazy sky setting, and Salty has a fifth sky setting of its own (code reading, confirmed in all 195 records) ¹. "Dusty" covers four different atmospheres with different scattering and sun strength, so one label hides four skies.
4. Hidden variation. About half the flags stand on a raised hill (99 on a hill, 96 on flat ground, by my re-run of the generator). None of this, nor the fog density, dune rotation or horizon shape, appears in the traits (own computation) ¹.
5. Two countries get their own code. The United States (atlas slot 2) gets smaller particles, a later fade-out, a damped vertical wave and unsoftened colours. Nepal (slot 89) is the only flag drawn with transparent pixels, so its double pennant keeps its shape (code reading) ¹.
6. The flag scrolls, so stills can look reversed. Because the image loops out from the pole, a single frame can catch the canton at the fly end. The index render of #2 shows the United States that way ¹.
7. The picture depends on when you look. The sun comes from the live clock, so every render is a moment at that place. The Fiji and Nepal renders in this essay are night scenes. The day-of-year helper mixes UTC and local dates, so in time zones with summer time the sun can be computed for the previous day. A leap-day term is also left fractional; both errors are small (code reading).
8. Rounded places. The coordinates are stored as single symbols. That rounds longitude to 4-degree steps (about 16 minutes of solar time) and latitude to steps of about 1.2 degrees (code reading) ¹.
9. Not fully deterministic. Emitter choice, per-row gravity and per-particle seeds use Math.random, so the fine texture of the smoke differs at every viewing. The animation clock resets after 30 hours of continuous running (code reading).
10. Dead code. A second palette reader is never called, and it would fail if it were, because it treats the palette list as one string. A loop meant to close each wind curve on a full turn has a precedence slip and never runs. Two switches, fixed_speed and square_image, are off (code reading).
11. Licence mismatch. The label reads CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, but the index's licence link points to the CC BY-NC 4.0 deed ¹.

The most coveted variants

No auction record, collector survey or trait-based "grail" list for World Flag was found. The notes below describe what makes certain outputs distinctive. They do not report market consensus.

The first and the last. The release order gives the two ends of the ranking a symbolic weight. #1, China, carries 25.14 per cent of global emissions in its trait, and #2, the United States, 12.04 per cent ¹. The final flags are Tuvalu, the Holy See (population 807) and Fiji, whose emissions trait is negative, at -0.16 MtCO2e ¹². China, the United States and Yemen were all in the artist's wallet at retrieval. Fiji is in an AB5D wallet ¹.

Special cases in the code. Nepal (#89) is the only non-rectangular flag and the only one drawn with transparency ¹.

Rare settings. The rarest colour is Salty, with three outputs: #42 Ethiopia, #92 Switzerland and #113 Afghanistan. Black, Grey Mud and White Mud have four each ¹. The lowest stripe counts are singletons: #97, Guinea (10), and #116, Norway (14) ¹.

Holders. At retrieval, 102 addresses held the 195 tokens. The artist's address held 43. One other address, not identified in any source inspected, held 13 ¹. VERSE's series page, in an automated extraction, gives total sales of $311,526 and a highest sale of $10,000. These figures could not be checked ⁸.

The flags in physical space

World Flag was designed for the phone, but it sits within a body of flag works that Gerrard has shown on large LED screens and in pavilions.

• Solar Pavilion / World Flag, Galway, 2017. An earlier use of the title: four simulations of the Amazon, Danube, Nile and Yangtze, each circling a slick of gasoline. They were shown in a scorched-larch pavilion at the Galway International Arts Festival, 17 to 30 July 2017 ⁹.
• Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017. This was commissioned by Channel 4 for Earth Day. It ran on a large LED screen in Somerset House's Fountain Court from 21 to 27 April 2017 ¹⁰. It was later shown at Desert X in the Coachella Valley in 2019 and at Dark MOFO in Tasmania in 2023 ⁵¹¹. For COP25 it was projected in the courtyard of the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, 2 to 13 December 2019 ¹².
• Western Flag (NFT), 2021. This single token was issued on Foundation with a 250 ETH reserve, with half the proceeds pledged to a regenerative agriculture fund ¹³. LACMA holds it as a gift of the artist, accession M.2023.148 ¹⁴.
• Petro National, 2022. This set of 196 oil-slick simulations has film thickness set by each country's oil consumption. The Centre Pompidou purchased #16 (Nigeria) in 2023, inventory AM 2023-805 ¹⁵¹⁶.
• Surrender (Flag) 2023, now STANDARD. A white flag of water vapour over the Mojave. It was shown on an outdoor LED screen at the Hayward Gallery's "Dear Earth", 21 June to 3 September 2023, overlapping the World Flag sale. From 29 September 2023 it featured in U2's shows at Sphere in Las Vegas ¹⁷¹⁸. Gerrard's text says it looks "towards ideas of stoppage, parlay and submission to larger planetary realities" ¹⁷.
• World Flag in a room. Art Blocks x Pace Verso presented World Flag at Art Blocks Marfa during Made in Marfa, 6 to 8 October 2023 ¹⁹²⁰. In 2026 Nguyen Wahed in New York paired it with Anna Barlik's "Flags of Non-Existent Countries", 17 July to 27 August ²¹. The gallery text says that "A flag compresses a whole political order into a two-dimensional symbol" ²¹. Neither source says how many flags were shown or on what screens.

Gerrard's exhibition list records World Flag only as a digital release. His group shows include "Flags" at Villa Empain, Brussels (2022) ²².

The mint

Invocation 0 was minted on 1 June 2023. The project was activated on 6 June ¹. The sale used an exponential Dutch auction (MinterDAExpV4). It started at 16:00 UTC on 28 June at 11 ETH, with a price half-life of 649 seconds, a resting price of 0.25 ETH and a scheduled end at 16:59:59 ¹². China was minted at 16:00:35 and the United States at 16:00:47. Only 14 tokens existed by 16:30, and 48 by 16:50. Then 144 were minted in the 36 seconds from 16:54:23 to 16:54:59, which completed the edition ¹. By then five half-lives had passed, which puts the price at roughly a third of an ETH (own computation from the configured schedule, not from payment records).

Decrypt reported that the final price would apply to all buyers ². The index, however, names a non-settlement minter and holds no settlement receipts for the project ¹. On that evidence, early buyers paid the higher prices of their moment. Whether any rebate was arranged outside the contract is not known.

Copyright and licensing

The index gives CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 as the label, but links to the CC BY-NC 4.0 deed ¹. The two differ on derivatives. Under the label, images may be shared non-commercially with attribution but not adapted. Under the linked deed, adaptation would be allowed. The label should be treated as the artist's intention until the link is corrected. The program runs on Babylon.js, which the platform loads at view time ¹. The Western Flag and Surrender (Flag) images above belong to John Gerrard's studio. They are hotlinked for reference, not re-hosted.

Significance and limitations

World Flag is the most data-bound project in the Art Blocks x Pace series. Its edition order is an emissions table, its locations are coded into the script, and its skies follow the real sun for as long as someone keeps it open. The hash shapes each desert, but the politics of the piece lives in the mint number, which assigns each country its place. It also carries Gerrard's smoke flags from LED walls at Somerset House and Desert X into the browser ⁵¹⁰. The market record is thin. No auctions, museum holdings or collector groups for World Flag itself were found, and the artist retained over a fifth of the edition.

Unresolved research questions:

1. Was the composite Artist's Proof ever minted or donated, and on which contract? Project 6 is capped at 195.
2. Why was Yemen minted first, on 1 June, and did the 1 June mint reach any buyer or exhibition?
3. Were early Dutch-auction buyers rebated down to the final price, as Decrypt reported, and what did the last tokens actually cost? The on-chain payments were not checked.
4. How many flags, and on what hardware, were shown at Art Blocks Marfa (2023) and Nguyen Wahed (2026)? Pace's post on X announcing the sale is a lead.
5. The quotations here from Artnet, Decrypt, the Irish Times, Kleinman and Nguyen Wahed came through automated extraction and should be checked against the pages.

Bibliography