On Tuesday, digital art supplier Feral File will debut “Crystalline Work,” a new generative, on-chain series from Irish contemporary artist John Gerrard that will algorithmically produce new pieces every hour for the next year.
The series, which will become the longest-running on-chain performance art project ever, takes Gerrard back to familiar territory: environmental activism. In “Crystalline Work,” a robot stationed at a digital, barren version of the North Pole runs an algorithm inspired by ice formations to create intricate designs made from crystal bar lattices.
The series also uses another Gerrard favorite, the WebGL browser API, to bring the hourly act of creating each piece to life with immersive, interactive 3D graphics.
Starting tomorrow, the robot will generate a new design every hour for the next 8,760 hours and post it into an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Each NFT costs $100 worth of ETH, with a quarter of the proceeds going to Homebooma rainforest restoration project in Ireland.
A sample output of ‘Crystalline Work’. Courtesy: John Gerrard, Feral File
In other ways, however, ‘Crystalline Work’ marks a clear departure for Gerrard from his existing oeuvre. In previous projects such as “World Flag” And “Western Flag,” the artist struck a decisively bleak tone when he warned of the failure of existing systems – nationalist or capitalist – to tackle climate change.
Now Gerrard says he is putting that kind of criticism behind him.
“I no longer want to be involved in art that observes the world, that comments on the world,” the artist said Declutter. “I am not interested.”
One of Gerrard’s earlier works, “Burning Flag”, was featured at Sphere in Las Vegas during a U2 concert. Courtesy: Stufish Entertainment Architects
Instead, Gerrard’s latest project aims to bring forward a positive vision of humanity’s potential to create: a beautiful, “luminous” representation of the possible.
“I’m moving to a different kind of approach,” Gerrard said. “It’s optimistic in a way that the other works just aren’t.”
The work will premiere this week at the start of the summer solstice and will continue until next year’s summer solstice. The sun is central to the series, as Gerrard sees it. The polluting heat of burnt oil is, in a sense, old sunlight; every tree planted in Ireland as a result of the project will protect the earth from a tangible amount of solar radiation; that action will, in turn, cause a palpable number of ice crystals to repopulate the planet’s poles.
A sample output of ‘Crystalline Work’. Courtesy: John Gerrard, Feral File
“Rather than being a piece of ecological protest, it is a piece about positive optimistic action in the face of climate change,” Gerrard said.
Ethereum was chosen as the on-chain home of the project because of its Striking embrace of one environmentally friendly evidence of the stake consensus mechanism in 2022.
But Gerrard has also deliberately tipped off lately“My contemporary art world rejects wholesale data,” he said. “But I believe that data is a very critical and crucial contemporary art language.”
“You really have to use data as an artist,” he continued. “Because data changes the world.”
Edited by Andrew Hayward