John Gerrard
This extensive interview, unpublished until now, took place at Pace Gallery in New York City, July 2022, on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition John Gerrard: Endling, marking Gerrard’s first major solo show with Pace. On view were several large-scale videos of realtime digital simulations, the result of 20 years of development using game engines and virtual worldbuilding which examine issues related to the political and societal effects of energy production & consumption, information flows, environmental exploitation, virtual labor, and simulated life.
SEAN CAPONE: Hello, John, thanks for sitting down with me for this chat. I like to frame these conversations in terms of media art, and specifically digital animation, as a kind of jumping off point, especially thinking about how animation has exploded in so many different directions over, let’s say, the last decade. In fact, I recently came across an interesting term, “expanded animation”, which was a nod to the conceptual terms ‘expanded cinema’ or ‘expanded sculpture’. But first, a little background: what was your point of entry into the medium of digital animation and simulation? What’s the timeline of your development as an artist in these mediums?
JOHN GERRARD: My first relationship, let’s say to the “digital”, first emerged in the 90s, mostly through the impact of house music in the UK at the time. I grew up in Ireland but did an undergraduate in the UK in a wonderful little art school called The Ruskin, which is part of Oxford University. In ‘94 – I was there til ‘97 – a lot of music was coming in from Detroit and Chicago. You had this big house music scene really blowing up in the UK. I remember standing in these big clubs in Liverpool and London, saying to myself, “If electronic, computer-generated sounds are doing this to music, what will it do to art?” At that time I made a kind of artistic commitment to computing.
While I was still an undergraduate, I approached a company outside Oxford called Wicks and Wilson, and they produced a 3D scan of my friend Mary. I called that scan an “image object”. It’s a photo-type object, a record, which was asking, “what does a 3-dimensional photograph do to the histories of media, to the histories of photography and sculpture?” I took that and went to Chicago to get a MFA at the School of the Art Institute.
There, it was difficult days, because you had programs like Softimage and these very dense, difficult 3D programs, which I floundered around with. I eventually fell back on interactive video for my MFA project – you know, responsive video, recorded and rendered interactive, in a way. But I knew that I hadn’t quite gotten to where I needed to get, so I took a year at Trinity in Dublin at a computer science/new media program, where I started working with teams of programmers and coders for the first time. When I was there, we took 3D scans into a game engine. I’m not now – nor was I then – a gamer, so I didn’t have that kind of organic relationship [with gaming]. I wrote to the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and got a grant to spend a year there around 2001. When I arrived they were like: here’s an animator, here’s a producer, here’s a programmer, here’s a texture artist, here’s a budget – go do something. With this team I made a very early piece using a hand-built model that was animated in an early game engine.
I spent a couple years at Ars Electronica. In 2004 I started to work on my first, let’s say, developed game-engine piece, One Thousand Year Dawn, a real-time animation portrait of a young man standing on a beach watching the sun, which will take a thousand years to rise. So he waits for a thousand years, in the work, in real time. In the year 3005 he leaves the scene, so all you’re left with is the beach with this risen sun. It’s a different kind of durational work. Time becomes a sculptural component of the work. That was also the first work I ever sold, in Miami in 2005. And I went from there.
SC: So you were dealing with these ideas that you’re still working with, right from the jump. And you had the team and support to explore this work, at a time when the technology was still really inconceivable. Thinking of your work in terms of traditional time-based, moving image art, there’s nothing in it that can be described as a cinematic structure or narrative pay-off. It’s described as “non-durational simulations”. Although they do have a ‘duration’, it’s much broader – more on a geological or solar timescale; at least, nothing that’s pegged to the timescale of human attention spans. Does that come from your original training as a sculptor? The slow dynamics of the work, these objects-on-turntables, seem influenced more by sculpture than video or cinema.
JG: Yeah, when I was emerging as an artist, I was paying close attention to Duchamp and such, then graduated to a real fascination with Bruce Nauman. These kind of actions that were neat circular stories in themselves. But getting back to the ‘image-object’, it’s a frozen thing, a cast, in a way. Once you bring it into a game engine, which I think of as a sort of stage, you have to place it somewhere. Your landscape, your place in the engine has edges, like a platform, and the object becomes a kind of prop, and it simply is there. There’s a virtual camera which is computing the real-time lighting conditions, sending that out to the projector at 60 frames per second. I think you’re probably right that you have a sculpture sitting on a stage, but probably triggered a bit by Nauman, I thought “what do you do with this thing, this time in this place?” You can tell it to move slowly from here to there over ten seconds, or over a thousand years – it’s the same one line of code. It’s an instruction-based world. And very organically you start thinking about theater – because theater is not film, it’s live-action, with a stage, actors, props, and a director giving instructions to the performers.
SC: And durational performance has also become a big part of the performance art world.
JG: Yeah. So I began to think of the engine as a stage where histories of theater, of performance, sculpture, all fell into the same space. And code as the driver of its logic and actions. The early work was a play on time, 1000 years long, and then the works after that, the Smoke Trees, were made out of particle systems and placed within the orbit of a day. The word “orbit” is important. As you mentioned the solar conditions of the work – we live in an orbital world, the earth is orbiting around the sun in the same path. At this time next year, the light conditions will be broadly similar as they are today. The first Smoke Trees, 2005-2006, we integrated an orbit of a solar day – as a gesture towards time using light, which is a measure of time for us as humans. Obviously solar time, light-time, is not pertinent to time as a subject – time is not dictated by the rise and fall of the sun. The next series after the Smoke Trees were the Dust Storms – we expanded the daily orbit into an annual orbit. You get long days in the summer and short in the winter. I locked onto this idea of an orbital logic with the work.
So to get back to your question – for the public, when they saw the sun going down on the dust storm at the Venice Biennale in 2009, they understood that this was not cinema.
SC: These virtual dust storms took place in Texas or Oklahoma – an American midwest landscape?
JG: Yes, that emerged from a single historic photograph of a dust storm in 1935, titled “Black Sunday”, the absolute nadir of the Dust Bowl when this extraordinary storm stripped off the topsoil of hundreds of millions of acres in the Midwest.
SC: Meanwhile the audience in Vienna is watching the sunset on the other side of the world...
JG: On Texan time. We always locked the work to the site of the subject in the work.
still from One Thousand Year Dawn (2005).
SC: That leads me to my next question, which is a bit of a challenge. Not to be snarky but to draw out an assumed critique about the process and the experience of the work. Let’s say, you have a Viennese audience watching a virtual sunset from across the world. What is the actual conceptual or experiential benefit to making generative work that evolves so imperceptibly over time, reacting to the environmental conditions in local real-time, as opposed to simply citing your inspiration for the piece and exhibiting a pre-rendered, looping, finite video? Speaking as a selfish viewer, who might be seeking a finite cinematic experience, how does this add to my experience of the work?
JG: I feel that producing these simulations is a particular form of worldmaking. Well, we can talk about worldmaking later. Just for now, let’s say it’s a particular form of picture-making. When I say “picture making”, I’m speaking less in a sense to the history of photography and more to that of painting, because you’re constructing a world in effect using light. The expectation from the audience as they approach the screen – and actually, I have always fought very hard to not show my works in a black-box environment, or, like, a carpeted environment ...
SC: You’ve shown them in public quite a bit, on large LED screens.
JG: The LED wall is just a gift for me, because you can put simulated worlds in the world-world, and you get out of the black box. Also, the LED wall is frameless, so you have the two worlds rubbing against each other. So, the public typically – less so now, perhaps – they come to media mostly through TV and then through cinema. TV and movies, they’re full of entertainment, it has a certain duration and expectation for a kind of storytelling. So I felt that this medium, this temporal world-making medium – despite the fact that it’s grown out of gaming which has a strong narrative, goal-oriented structure, killing things, chasing and finding things, very outcome-driven – I didn’t make it necessarily to entertain, it’s a kind of social sculpture. I remember one person said to me, about the Dust Storm, “this is the most boring film I’ve ever seen.” It’s an ecological narrative of something present in the world – you can talk about the dust storm in relationship to human migration and displacement and so on.
To get back to your question, these are slow works that are not necessarily very entertaining or satisfying. Some viewers will sit down and spend time with these worlds, drift with them a little bit. But actually, to pull back a little bit ... this is data. I often say: this is information, this is not image, this is not a record. You’re looking at the flow of information – it’s data, moving frictionlessly. So there’s an interplay between these virtual worlds and the very nature of data, which is just kind of frictionless and flows. Obviously it emerges energetically from somewhere and goes somewhere else and is discarded, so ....
“I often say: this is information, this is not image, this is not a record. You’re looking at the flow of information – it’s data, moving frictionlessly. So there’s an interplay between these virtual worlds and the very nature of data”
SC: Well, just to reverse the question, is it important for you as an artist that every time you’re exhibiting a piece, that you show a real-time generative piece pegged to the correct time and location? Maybe it’s only up for a weekend, and from the audience point of view, the logistics would make it just as plausible to show a pre-rendered segment of the work.
JG: Absolutely, and I have never done that. Because – say with Western Flag – the code that’s producing the flag is a unique generative form. The flag cannot be the same any moment to the next. You might produce a video render of it, it might be broadly similar but not the same. The other thing is that, on November 1st the sun is in a very particular position, as opposed to where the position of the light and shadowing would be on July 1st. So, are you going to render out 48 hours of the simulation for the weekend when you’re showing it?
SC: I guess that depends on if you think there’s going to be audience members there watching the whole 48 hours trying to catch you out. <laughter>
JG: Which doesn’t typically happen. But you know, I guess it’s the artist’s prerogative just to be strict about such things.
SC: Okay. So, you said that we’re looking at data, more so than imagery. But there are cinematic forms that you’re referencing, especially from documentary film and landscape photography, which comes from history painting. A lot of in-depth research goes into documentary filmmaking which manifests in a very aestheticized way, in the decisions about framing, motion inside the frame, etc. So, first we talked about sculpture, then about theater. If we assume this ‘data’ is about revealing the unseen flow of capital, energy, and geopolitical power which is embedded in these landscapes – Trevor Paglen’s work comes to mind here – I’m wondering about the possibility that you’re also making documentaries?
JG: Hmm, well, I would prefer to talk about two series of works that relate to each other. One is the Grow Finish Units, they are computer-controlled pig production units, totally abandoned on the Oklahoma landscape. They’re these finishing, fattening machines for hogs, for making pork. I was in Marfa, admiring Judd’s works, and I’d drive out across the landscape and there’s all these repetitive sculptural serial forms, with no expectation of any human presence. I’d function on the landscape like a scanner, running down these long dirt roads photographing these pig units, and using Google Earth. Over six months to a year we built these virtual portraits of these systems – these big fans and feed lots, towers full of corn – and it’s a very precise record of that moment. It’s totally documentary. There’s a narrative element where a truck arrives at the shed once a month or two to take pigs away. Later I came across these Google ‘data farms’ that were uncannily similar! The architectural language, the materials, the generators on the front running full time, you’ve got ventilators on the side to keep them cool. So I made the second series simply called Farms which are portraits of these Google data farms.
SC: Interesting that of all the architectural possibilities, Google chose the model of the factory farm.
JG: Well, it’s like, who’s consuming who? The data farm is a farm with two faces. On the one hand, you’re consuming it, it’s consuming you. It’s an interesting interplay. But they’re gonna tear those data farms down in a couple years for something different. Without a doubt, there is no more accurate record of that data farm than my artwork. You know? In my studio we describe them as portraiture; we produced an uncannily accurate portrait of the farm literally down to the screws. Without a doubt there’s a documentary element to it; at the same time, they just are what they are, they carry a lot of power in being present architecturally on those landscapes, and also by not being available. I hired a helicopter to survey the building from the air, being chased by Google security guards in golf carts. You can’t typically get close to these buildings, so we produced these detailed portraits through a kind of air raid.
And, you know, as an artist, you can plug into support systems, raise money, be ambitious, make it possible to capture a moment in time without making any conclusions about it.
SC: One of the aspects of documentary filmmaking is that the filmmaker leads the audience through some kind of narrative journey and moral conclusion, but in your case you’re denying them that closure. So, like with the Google data farm piece, we can say that your work is about exposing certain industrial mechanisms which are kept out of public view. In a previous interview you said “our great waste material, the fundamental excrement of the 20th Century, is invisible.”
JG: Yeah. Which is carbon dioxide.
SC: Right. So with that in mind, I wanted to focus on the installation themselves. You create these pristine architectural environments and seamless media displays. The mechanisms of the work are opaque to the viewer, and there’s probably not even that much to see anyway. But it does seem somewhat contrary to the work’s intention which is to expose the material conditions of invisibilized power within industrial society. What led you to that decision, as opposed to, say, the kind of art & tech installations which reveal and even romanticize the technological guts of its own production and display? Am I off base with that?
JG: Hmm, on the one hand, the art world is afflicted with this chronic nostalgia. It’s amazing to me the volume of historic media that are being shown, like that particular fetish for film [projectors], those kinds of things. I have a limited appetite for that.
SC: Maybe not a fetishization, but let’s say more of a sculptural component of the work, like visible VHS players and cables as part of its material. You don’t see that so much with digital work. With digital, the infrastructure became invisible again.
JG: We talked about Nauman before; you know, Nauman hides nothing. You have the monitor, the player, the wiring, it’s all present. Then you get to an artist like Roni Horn, via Judd, actually – Roni Horn has these pristine, hermetic worlds that are very very resolved. I suppose I fall on that side of the spectrum: very resolved, but it doesn’t look very minimal. In this gallery, at 510 W. 25th, the historic Pace space, there were two shows: Robert Irwin installed three Perspex posts, very austere and minimal; and Tony Smith installed these black metal sculptures. I really enjoyed that mode of working, that formalism. Like I said it doesn’t look like a minimal show but the ghosts in my show are minimalism. The LED wall is a very resolved sculptural surface, but it’s pure image as well. At some point we’ll have to touch on how compromised that is, because we’re relying on global supply chains, supplies of rare metals, and there’s a whole layer to allow a show like this.
“It doesn’t look like a minimal show but the ghosts in my show are minimalism. The LED wall is a very resolved sculptural surface, but it’s pure image as well. At some point we’ll have to touch on how compromised that is, because we’re relying on global supply chains, supplies of rare metals, and there’s a whole layer to allow a show like this.”
SC: Plus the infrastructure of the global internet itself, being able to stream the data and keep the installation functioning.
JG: Yes, but in this case, these three works here are rendered locally. There’s no network here, it’s a game engine on a PC, the graphics card is sending the world to the wall.
SC: That’s the lack of a “material condition” I was talking about, being a lot less dramatic than, like, a big clattering film projector looping film all across the room. You have a PC with a video card and a cable. Sounds like your decision to do that was historically formal and less a meta-critique on how the power structures are invisible in your subject matter, etcetera. Or perhaps it is just a convenient affordance of digital technology itself.
JG: Hmmm, well... both. On the one hand, people come in to see the show and they can’t really parse what the LED wall is. I say, this is the exact same technology as in Times Square, but you can get close to it, put your hand on it. And then they’re like, “is this real?” That’s the next question. “Where is this?” And I’m interested in that anxious place where the public are questioning this world that they’re experiencing. They get a bit shocked when they learn the scene is completely virtual. Getting back to revealing the method: I don’t want to do anything to get in the way of that, like a media cabinet or whatever. I’ve said it a few times but I think of it as just pure image. You have the scene, the gallery or the surrounding landscape, and this frameless image floating in the world. The thing that I’m aiming for, that I fight for actually – it’s not easy to achieve – is to use, like, a scalpel ... and you sort of cut a hole in the world, and you peel it away and there’s this ‘other world’ there. Using contemporary methodologies, ideas, and materials, like James Turrell, Robert Irwin, those artists that emerged out of post-studio practices on the West Coast of America. Artistically, this is very much part of my history, and I’m doing pretty much the same thing.
SC: So, in this Pace exhibition here, you’ve opened up the large external doors to the street to create more of an inviting public encounter, like Times Square but up close and personal. This speaks to the literal monumental tendency of the work. Not only in the objects you depict, but the role they’re performing in these situated landscapes. Could you talk a bit about monuments – yet another kind of art your work touches upon – as a particular kind of public sculpture whose role is to reinforce socio/political narratives?
JG: Yeah. There’s a sense, not always, but there is a sense of permanence in the monument. The sort of interventions I propose and install are typically between one to three months long. Be it the desert in Palm Springs, Lincoln Center for the Public Art Fund, etc. They are monumental in scale; I suppose the reason for that is the world is an enormous place. The locations for these interventions are architecturally vast in scale. The works I do are always site-specific, and because this is software, there is no inherent scale. I would go so far to say that I would never propose a work at large scale for the sake of it. If you’re going to put a work at Lincoln Center, the work has to speak to that context. The work gets to those scales in response to those settings. Also the subject of the work in this case, a flag, has to be a certain scale in order to perform its function as a flag. If it was smaller it would be something else.
SC: In terms of the monument’s function, you could say they’re much longer lived than a traditional monument because they continue to play. The simulations are ongoing even when they’re ‘off’.
JG: People talk about the vulnerability of software art in conservation terms, of which there are many. But at the same time, software has a weirdly robust quality. Ideally in the future one could find a copy of the software and render it. We have our own archive which is online – a very detailed archive of what the work is, how it was made, the code, how it’s displayed. That’s the first layer. Getting the work into institutional settings is the next layer – the MoMAs, the Tates. And there’s an emergent community of non-analogue conservators that are coming up now, people specifically interested in digital preservation. That’s really the final layer, the passionate open-source community that’s interested in digital artifacts of a certain time. There’s this incredible nerd passion. Because I’m using videogame engine technology, I can probably piggyback on that public drive to preserve digital culture. For the most part the institutions have ignored it.
SC: And ‘digital rot’ is real, even among media artists whose work is barely two decades old. So, regarding the preservation efforts of your work – if it gets to the point where only recordings or non-dynamic renderings of your work are all that’s possible to be saved and exhibited for future generations, does that kill it for you? Would you accept a non-live simulation to be shown or do you favor the ‘right to oblivion’ if the original conditions cannot be met? Sorry to keep circling back to that point.
JG: The live simulation has qualities, sometimes I describe it as a liquid quality, as it runs off the graphics card, which is very hard to preserve through the video pipeline. You would have to print each frame at 30 frames per second or 60 or whatever, at full frame. So a 30 second snippet of the simulation, uncompressed, would be like 10 GB or something.
SC: Which would be nothing to future storage capabilities, but even now seems substantial.
JG: It’s like Kurt Schwitters, who's known for that one picture of the construction [the Merzbau] in his apartment. It’s nice to have that picture but the work is lost. If we lose the ability to render the software, I would say: certainly, show the video capture but it’s not the work. You don’t have the work. You have a record, a snapshot and it should be billed in that regard. I think it would be more challenging imagining how to deliver this installation after I’m dead. Even now, I turn my back on an installation for half a second and everything goes wrong! You have to fight for every single detail with these kinds of installs; we’ve been working on this show for two and a half years!
Installation view of Endling (Martha) at Pace Gallery, NYC. Photo by Frank Heath.
SC: Another thing I wanted to talk about is desire. This is where it gets a little more esoteric. You see, I’m interested in ‘the desire of looking’ at pictures. We seek to look at things, and in the act of looking, meaning is constructed. But this meaning becomes very complicated by simulation, by A.I., by generative art. It presents the possibility that these images, these worlds, and the characters that occupy them have desires of their own. Does that make sense? By inhabiting these rule-driven dynamic worlds, we see this peculiar kind of life unfold in real-time.
JG: It’s funny. I applied to DALL-E from Open AI to be a beta tester. They accepted me a few weeks ago and I got an invite to use it. I put in a couple things, word prompts: wheat fields, empty desert, sun. It recreated a little bit of ‘my work’, it did an uncannily good job at it. This DALL-E software, the training set is every picture that’s ever been taken on the internet. What struck me was this A.I. is feeding on the artistry, the framing, the decision making of billions of creators. And on the basis of the uncredited usage of all that human creativity, it’s producing this incredible image from a text prompt. So over time, let’s say, editors will stop commissioning photographers to set up shoots and so on, and everyone will just use it feeding on someone else’s aesthetic. And I started thinking: what happens when DALL-E starts circling around an empty center? What happens when all the images in the world are A.I. generated? Does visual progress just stop? Because the A.I. will inevitably circle around its own emptiness.
SC: Or, maybe it’s a motivation for evolution, for us to grow another set of eyes. Motivation to create other ways of seeing, of making images. The art historian James Elkins wrote a book back in the 90s, The Object Stares Back, in which he points out how technology stirred our “ways of seeing” out of its complacency by presenting us with new kinds of images that are produced “at the frontiers of the unvisualizable”, which is such a beautiful turn of phrase about these territories.
But actually, I thought we could talk about the roles and desires of the characters and avatars who perform in some of your simulations. There is a lot of ritualized theatrical behavior, and I was wondering to what degree their ‘life’ is autonomous, even if that’s just purely philosophical.
JG: It’s interesting, my relationship to A.I. With those characters you’re talking about, simulated characters performing these annual laments, these ritual performances. We produced immense training sets of data from characters wearing motion capture suits and fed them into a neural network system. And what we discovered was that it did work, but was extraordinarily flattening of all the actions which brought the humanity to the figures. It was flattened by the small scale of the system. So we pulled back from that and produced a different system called “motion matching” which connects one performance to the next without any jump cuts. So, I keep approaching A.I. and then stepping away. I don’t think I have sufficient scale to make something that’s satisfying to me as an artist. I’m not sure I’m totally answering your question.
SC: Well, I threw a lot at you. I guess it comes down to the role of the characters and the idea of agency or desire on the part of the simulation to live its own life. The artist Ian Cheng explores these ideas in a lot of detail.
JG: The Corn Boy characters you’re referring to (Corn Work (corrib) 2020) respond to a specific landscape in Ireland. The Corrib River used to drive a lot of flour mills and in the mid-20th century they were dismantled. It was seen as old-fashioned but of course it was an incredibly clean power source. I wanted to recall that language of river power, and also maybe earlier histories of Irish culture where you didn’t have an individual high up in the air in an air-conditioned tractor like in contemporary farming. These figures are close to the ground and to communities as part of an interwoven social system, performing the shape of a solar wheel. What interested me the most was this organic human performance coming from the motion capture and this very simple neural network, that you could produce a performance that runs 365 days a year. The ultimate durational performance in a way, about agricultural violence.
SC: But they are just automatons. They don’t have individual agency.
JG: Umm, no. That would be a different work actually. Because in a way, those characters were always cogs in a productive system. The leaf figure is an older female dancer, a melancholy older folk figure, she performs a sort of lament, there isn’t a kind of emergent autonomous behavior within it.
still from Corn Work (Corrib) 2020.
SC: Unlike other artists working with game engines and worldbuilding, you don’t seem to be as interested in constructing a personal mythology. But the Corn Boy characters do tap into that sense of folklore, or your other character, the oil-stick painter, reminds me of the myth of Sisyphus – a mythic character who’s consigned or cursed to a single repetitive task.
JG: Just to outline that, that’s a piece where the character – who’s actually a painter I met, Angelo Martinez, who stars in the work – he draws one square meter in black oilstick crayon on a barn in Middle America. He’ll be working on that for thirty years. So in 2038 he draws the last square and leaves forever. That was the first time we worked with motion capture which was a beautiful way to turn human motion into data. Once it becomes data it’s like an infinitely malleable alphabet for producing annual performances.
Scrolling back, you mentioned Ian Cheng, whose work I admire. My aesthetic requirements for the work are so onerous within this language I’ve developed over twenty years, that autonomous emergent behavior, at the moment they don’t fit together. We don’t have the firepower, in computing terms, to produce hyper-realistic autonomous aesthetics. Ian’s aesthetic is more game-like, it’s low resolution...
Q: He says that’s the trade-off that he makes. With you, the verisimilitude is tied into the formal meaning of the work?
JG: He does say that? I could never make that trade-off. I tried, I just couldn’t do it. And also, I’m the “strong author” of the work – I don’t leave that much to chance.
Q: Ok. So! This is the point we have to talk about NFTs, and how dramatically they’ve escalated and commandeered the conversation about digital art across all registers. What are your feelings about that space, considering how its economy of speed, short attention spans and rapid consumption might seem at odds with the kind of scale, presence and slowness of your own work?
JG: I think that the most interesting thing about cryptocurrencies is they’ve allowed the tokenization of visual things. In so doing, they’ve produced a bonanza of support for historically underserved artists, for digital artists on the periphery of the analog art market for forever. I’m thrilled by that. I think it’s probably the biggest art historical shift in decades. I know it’s messy, there’s a lot of compromise, ecologically... there’s a lot of layers of complexity there. I support them with some reservations, but it’s incredible that artists who’ve devoted themselves to digital practices finally have a method to thrive and become more ambitious.
I’ve just done a project with Art Blocks, a generative art project called PetroNational. My key into the NFT space was with WebGL – a web graphics language that lets you put the game engine into the browser. So I was able to put a spatial, temporal world in the browser which can be sold as NFTs. You’ve got two things simultaneously happening: a radical expansion of the exhibition, because anybody on Earth can go to Art Blocks and experience the work; secondly, you’ve got a novel support system and marketplace for digital things. Both those things are incredible and so valuable, and they will incrementally transform art schools within ten years. And, I would hope we will see a lessening of the dominance of painting which frankly I’m mightily tired of. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I like a good painting. But there’s too many of them, and too many artists coming out of school thinking that’s the only way they’re gonna survive.
Q: I’ve been working in digital art for as long as you have, since the mid 90s; you wait for this moment your whole life, for digital culture to ascend into the mainstream art world, and you think it’s going to lift all the boats. But then, a year down the line, you go around the galleries and it looks like they’ve dug their heels in even deeper, doubling down on painting and traditional art objects. And back in the NFT space, it seems like everyone is a digital artist now making lots of money, so the scene immediately became very competitive, with exhausting levels of community participation that seem frustrating, even extortionary, in a way.
JG: You know, you have to be careful of your mental health in that context, because that’s a very strong sentiment. The sense of FOMO a year ago was brutal, post-Beeple, all these insane doodads making millions of dollars. And now a lot of the energy has flown down to on-chain generative art, like with Art Blocks. ‘Blue chip’ is now, like, generative art. And people are starving to contextualize generative art, they’re looking for their own histories, and celebrating forgotten artists. I wouldn’t wander around Chelsea looking for anything to do with this space. I would wander around Outland, around Art Blocks, around fxhash ... it’s all post-geographic, it’s all platform. I’m amazed by the artists coming into the space now. It’s radical, and I think it’s going to be a pretty incredible decade. And it will be radically different in a year. That’s the best thing I can say about it.