John Gerrard (artist)
John Gerrard, (born 20 July 1974) is an Irish artist, best known for his sculptures, which typically take the form of digital simulations displayed using real-time computer graphics.
He undertook postgraduate studies at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College, Dublin, and in 2002 was awarded a Pépinières Residency at Ars Electronica, Linz, where he developed his first works in 3D Real-time computer graphics.
Many works have featured geographically isolated industrial facilities that are a hidden part of the global production network that makes the luxuries of contemporary life possible.
Here the format manifests something quite real, albeit at the periphery of most of our worlds – the discomfort of this admission is part of the work's impact – since for many of us, the arrival of food in our markets and the availability of oil are things we take on faith, if we think about them at all.
[1]Gerrard's works are constructed as simulations or virtual worlds, using 3D Real-time computer graphics – a technology originally developed for military use, and now used extensively in the videogame industry (he currently uses Unigine 3D engine[2][3]).
[5] He has also said that the works constitute a continuing reflection upon his own time: 'these melancholic realms are in some way a road movie of the Twentieth Century, a revisiting of the extraordinary comforts and freedoms that I've experienced.
These photographs are used in the studio as textures for a reconstructed, hand-built virtual 3d model of the structure, which in turn is then placed within a 'virtual world' that incorporates the passing of time and other environmental elements.
[5] While they use the same software that is employed for intensively interactive gaming environments, the works offer the viewer no freedom of movement, and generally feature a slow camera path that orbits a silent, isolated scene.
The work features a simulated "twin" of the squat building flanked by diesel generators and powerful cooling towers, as seen from a virtual camera orbiting the facility.
[15] Pulp Press (Kistefos) 2013 is situated in the grounds of the Kistefos-Museet Sculpture Park, the site of a nineteenth-century paper mill in Jevnaker, an hour north of Oslo, Norway.
Within a projected simulation, the original paper press operates continually, generating 'bales' of data using a physical modelling algorithm devised specially for the work.
The bales are stored on hard drives each of which, when it reaches full capacity, is lodged inside the pavilion, thus providing a physical indicator of the accretion of virtual data.
[17] In a recent series of works under the collective title Exercise Gerrard has addressed what James der Derian has called the "military-industrial-media-entertainment network"[18] – the convergence of media spectacle and military power, both operated through digital simulation technology.
With the same blank dispassion of a film such as The Hurt Locker it creates an alien landscape in which McGregor's six dancers, in Lucy Carter's half-light, grapple with the choreography of conflict.
The contrast between Gerrard's film event and Tippett's gentle pastorale is brutal in its irony, but McGregor's neo-balletic vocabulary, with its anguished grapplings and cradlings, unites the two.
[24] On a simulacrum of the barren Djibouti landscape, two teams of computer-generated figures, wearing red and blue, the traditional colours of war gaming, meet daily at dawn to initiate a series of cryptic gestural routines.
The figures represent a group of elite athletes who were engaged for the project during their training for the 2012 London Olympics and whose actual movements were subsequently digitised using motion capture technologies.
[26] The images show a mysterious structure in the heart of the Chinese desert, a precise system of roadways the size of a small town and apparently designed to be seen from orbit.
Gerrard commissioned an American satellite imaging firm to depth-scan these markings, and visited the site to document it photographically, in order to digitally reconstruct the entire structure and its surrounding landscape.
Into this simulation, the artist places motion-captured simulacra of thirty-nine workers from a Ghangzhou computer manufacturing plant, clothed in the blue uniforms and elasticated paper bonnets they wear for their work.
The process then draws to a close, the actors reassemble at the centre of the scene, the ground-level point of view gravitates around the worker who endured the longest, and the exercise begins anew.
Artner continues: Dust Storm unites a classic image from the Great Depression with a contemporary industrial landscape, setting them in a cosmological orbit that is completed over the full spectrum of a year.
Gerrard has stated that his visit to the Chinati Foundation at Marfa following the 2007 show Equal, That Is, To the Real Itself, and in particular seeing Donald Judd's 100 Untitled Works in Milled Aluminium, sensitised him to the recurrent forms of the pig production units he saw in the distance from the highway.
)[5] Oil Stick Work was later shown for one full calendar year in Canary Wharf as part of Art on the Underground and has subsequently been exhibited in institutions globally.
