John Gerrard

John Gerrard is an Irish artist who makes simulations: virtual worlds built in a game engine and drawn live by a computer, in step with the real time of day and year at the place they depict. He studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College Dublin. He made his first real-time 3D works during a 2002 residency at Ars Electronica in Linz.

His subjects are the remote sites that power modern life. His team photographs a site thousands of times and rebuilds it by hand as a 3D model. Tate holds Sow Farm (near Libbey, Oklahoma) 2009, a pig farm in the American Midwest. The Irish Museum of Modern Art bought one of his Dust Storm works, which set a 1930s storm over the Kansas landscape of today. Solar Reserve (Tonopah, Nevada) 2014 played on a huge LED wall at Lincoln Center before LACMA acquired it. Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015 portrays a Google data farm he surveyed from a helicopter after the company refused him access.

Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017, made for Earth Day with Channel 4, flies a flag of black smoke over Spindletop, one of the first big oil strikes in the United States. In 2021 he released Western Flag (NFT), the first NFT by an artist in Pace's program, and LACMA now holds it. Petro National (2022), the first release of Art Blocks and Pace Verso, draws 196 countries and regions as oil spills whose thickness follows each one's oil use. The Centre Pompidou bought Petro National #16 (Nigeria) in 2023. World Flag followed that year: 195 national flags made of colored smoke, set in deserts of a bleak future.