John Gerrard's Petro National in the digital museum in progress
Using mouse or gesture control, the individual works can be viewed from various orientations and in variable focus.
"Petro National" by John Gerrard depicts 196 nations as gasoline spills on the world ocean. The artist has created a custom thin-film refraction algorithm, which reproduces the phenomenon of iridescence through the simulation of millions of rays of light broken down into a novel conceptual prismatic language. Each country in "Petro National" reflects its per capita annual consumption of petroleum, with low-consumption countries manifesting a very thin spill leaning towards the blue green spectrum to high-consumption countries being thick, lustrous and highly iridescent forms. The world community consumes 100 million barrels of oil every day, and energy consumption has become a signifier of political power, with radically differing patterns between global north and south.
Engaging the potential of temporal and spatial media online through game engine technology, Gerrard has connected the world of WebGL with NFTs in this project. Each of the 196 generated worlds is rendered in real time in the browser and runs on local time as dictated by the time zone of its capital city. Night, day and seasonality can be experienced across the year in the work with long days in summer and short in winter. The selection of digital museum in progress on the occasion of the project "raising flags" shows the countries Austria, Burkina Faso, Columbia, Armenia, Angola and USA.
"Petro National" by John Gerrard is the first art project presented by museum in progress in its online exhibition space "digital mip". It is also the first manifestation of the "raising flags" project by museum in progress.
More information on "Petro National":
Pace Gallery: www.pacegallery.com/journal/john-gerrard-petro-national
Art Blocks: www.artblocks.io/project/0x64780CE53f6e966E18a22Af13a2F97369580Ec11-0
Production credits: Werner Poetzelberger, Producer; Helmut Bressler, Programmer. Courtesy: John Gerrard, Pace Gallery, Art Blocks and Richard Kim.
