Commissions

Greenlit: John Gerrard: Western Flag, Channel 4

John Gerrard: Western Flag –  The artist John Gerrard, widely regarded as a pioneer of digital media, is creating a brand new work for Channel 4. Looking deceptively like film or video, his works are in fact simulations – virtual worlds made using real-time computer graphics, a technology developed by the military and now used extensively in the gaming industry. They are often painstakingly accurate, moving-image portraits of locations that speak to the way the modern world is changing: a solar energy plant, a Google ‘data farm’, a ‘Grow Finish’ unit that fattens pigs for slaughter without the need for human supervision.

This new project will be a virtual flag made out of perpetually-renewing black smoke that Gerrard will place in a perfect CGI replica of Spindletop, Texas – the birthplace of the modern oil industry. The work will run in cyberspace for a year – exactly parallelling the sunrises, sunsets, lengthening shadows and changing seasons of the real Spindletop – and, for one day in Spring 2017, will break into the Channel 4 schedule in the junctions between programmes – an icon of climate change and modern society’s dependence on oil.

Channel: Channel 4

TX: Spring 2017

Source: Channel 4 press release