PRESENTATION: John Gerrard-Petro National NFTs

The Irish artist John Gerrard is best known for his sculptures and installations, which typically take the form of digital simulations, displayed using real-time computer graphics. Gerrard’s works concern themselves with the nature of contemporary power by exemplifying the mass structures and vast networks of energy which materialised during the 20th Century.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Pace Gallery Arcjive

In the contemporary world, simulations are no longer just secondhand copies, but are increasingly both engine and autopilot of leisure, economy, politics and warfare. Gerrard’s work offers us portraits of this world through the prism of its own technological medium: using the very software that enables the operations of entertainment, industry and warfare. John Gerrard’s “Petro National NFTs” addresses contemporary issues of oil consumption, it features the outlines of different countries and regions, which are represented as glistening patches of gasoline on the world ocean. At its core, the project examines the global impact of burning 100 million barrels of oil per day and the ways that energy consumption has become a signifier of political power, explicitly addressing the disparity in oil consumption between the global north and south. Engaging the potential of temporal and spatial media online through game engine technology, Gerrard has connected the world of WebGL with NFTs in this ground-breaking project. The artist has created a custom thin-film refraction algorithm, which reproduces the phenomenon of iridescence through the simulation of millions of rays of light broken down into a novel conceptual prismatic language. Each “Petro National NFT “has been assigned varying degrees of thickness or thinness depending on a given per capita annual oil use of the country or region. Lower national consumption rates yield thinner, delicate oil spills in the NFTs, while higher consumption rates produce more intensely iridescent scenes. Light conditions in the NFTs, which run on the local times of the respective capital cities of the depicted countries and regions, change throughout the year in accordance with the seasons. Night and day are also experienced in the NFTs. On a spatial level, the NFTs can be viewed from various orientations on the screen by dragging on the scene. Each work features different atmospheric and wave activities as well as varied sea colors, all of which are produced as part of a randomized, generative process. Gerrard will dedicate 25 percent of the artist’s proceeds from Petro National NFT sales to permanent CO2 removal via Climeworks. Remaining artist’s proceeds will be dedicated to regenerative farming organizations supporting farmers globally to move beyond petro agriculture and nitrogen fertilizer usage. The project aligns with Gerrard’s longstanding investigations of current environmental and geo-political conditions. A pioneer in generative art, Gerrard has devoted over 20 years of his practice to developing game engine technology for his public-facing simulations, which, like the Petro National NFTs, exist as virtual worlds unto themselves. The artist has exhibited his work at the 2022 Biennale of Sydney, the 2021 Gwangju Biennale and Thailand Biennial, the 2019 Okayama Art Summit in Japan, and other international venues. Among his past projects is Western Flag (NFT), which was the first NFT to be produced by an artist within Pace’s program.

John Gerrard has developed a sophisticated method of trans-historical collage, overlaying terrain, figure, image and gesture captured from real bodies and sites using satellite data, intensive photographic documentation, 3D scanning and motion capture. The resulting works are sculptures that exist in virtual space, within environments that include complex algorithmic choreographies, multiple moving viewpoints, and realistic cycles of day and night that unfold in ‘real time’ over the course of an entire year. Such works, evidently, can never be experienced as a whole. In each case, what you see is one of many possible projections of a highly complex data set, every aspect of which is continually calculated and rendered in real time. These moving images have never existed as a time series: each frame is produced and rendered dynamically, and instantly discarded. The nature of such images, and the emerging visual culture they belong to, remains an open question for art history and theory. Despite the high-tech production, the restraint Gerrard brings to these bleak scenes, and the resigned complacency and stereotyped behaviors of their players, recall Beckett’s minimal theatre of exhaustion more than Hollywood CGI movies. Each of the works sets in place an algorithmic set of conditions, which are then left to unfold within the time and space of the virtual world. The viewer—a technologically-mediated subject, scanning the scene at a distance, through the virtual cameras that orbit the scene—is left to piece together the logic of their movements and the nature and meaning of the performance.

Photo: John Gerrard, Petro National NFT 183, © John Gerrard, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallry, 540 West 25th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 21-23/6/2022, Days & Hours: Mon-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-16:00, www.pacegallery.com/