Nfts
Why John Gerrard Generates Ethereum NFT Art Every Hour for a Full Year
On Tuesday, digital art provider Feral File will debut “Crystalline work” a new on-chain generative series from Irish contemporary artist John Gerrard that will produce new pieces algorithmically every hour over the next year.
The series, poised to become the longest-running chain performance art project ever attempted, returns Gerrard to familiar territory: environmental activism. In “Crystalline Work,” a robot stationed in a barren, digital version of the North Pole runs an algorithm inspired by ice formations to create intricate patterns made from arrays of crystal bars.
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.
Every hour starting tomorrow, for the next 8,760 hours, the robot will generate a new design and transform it into a NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. Each NFT will cost $100 worth of ETH, and a quarter of the proceeds from the sale will be donated to Original treea rainforest restoration project in Ireland.
An example of the result of “Crystal Work”. Courtesy: John Gerrard, Feral File
In other respects, however, “Crystalline Work” marks a clear departure for Gerrard from his existing work. In past projects like “Flag of the world” And “Western flag, » the artist adopted a decidedly dire tone as he warned of the failure of existing systems – nationalist or capitalist – to combat climate change.
Now Gerrard has said he is putting that kind of criticism behind him.
“I no longer want to get involved in art that observes the world, that comments on it,” said the artist. Decrypt. “I am not interested.”
One of Gerrard’s previous works, “Burning Flag”, exhibited at the Sphere in Las Vegas during a U2 concert. Courtesy: Stufish Entertainment Architects
Instead, with his latest project, Gerrard seeks to offer a positive vision of humanity’s creative potential: a beautiful and “luminous” demonstration of the possible.
“I’m switching to a different type of approach,” Gerrard said. “It’s optimistic in the sense that other works just aren’t.”
The work will be presented this week at the start of the summer solstice and will continue until the summer solstice next year. The sun is at the heart of the series, according to Gerrard. The polluting heat of burning oil is, in a meta sense, the old sunlight; every tree planted in Ireland through the project will protect the Earth from a tangible amount of the sun’s rays; this action will in turn allow a palpable number of ice crystals to repopulate the planet’s poles.
An example of the result of “Crystal Work”. Courtesy: John Gerrard, Feral File
“Instead of being an ecological protest, this is a positive and optimistic action in the face of climate change,” Gerrard said.
Ethereum was chosen as the project’s on-chain home due to its high profile embrace of one ecological proof of stake consensus mechanism in 2022.
But Gerrard has also been intentionally moving, lately, toward data-driven art. He firmly describes work created from data and not media as “Crystalline Work”. If climate change is the crucial issue of the moment, as Gerrard sees it, then data is the crucial medium, despite the slow adoption of data by elite arts institutions.
“My contemporary art world rejects data wholesale,” he said. “But I believe that data is a most critical and crucial language of contemporary art.”
“As an artist, you really have to use data now,” he continued. “Because data changes the world. »
Edited by Andrew Hayward