john gerrard

This month, on the winter solstice on December 21, LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab will debut (opens in a new window) SPIRITS, a new browser-based artwork by john gerrard that unfolds across LACMA’s homepage over the course of a full solar year. A recipient of the Art + Technology Lab grant in 2017, gerrard has long explored the intersections of computation, environmental degradation, and extraction. With SPIRITS, he brings those concerns in particular to the intimate scale of the handheld digital device, transforming 96 discarded plastic sandals and shoes—collected along the shores of four major seas—into luminous, challenging virtual portraits.

Each of the found shoes carries stories that cannot be fully recovered: of leisure, labor, tourism, possibly migration, currents and the slow churn of oceanic time. gerrard and producers photographed these artifacts, transforming them into gaussian splats, an AI rendering technique that composes objects from cloud-like points. In the art interface, the shoes appear suspended, overlaid with a morphing layer that oscillates between light, gasoline, 1960s Californian psychedelia, ocean heat maps, wildfires, and ending in a burn, a void. The result is a portrait of life not through its flora or fauna, but through human refuse—disposable plastic objects that bear permanent witness to planetary-scale systems of consumption and circulation.

SPIRITS is organized around four classes corresponding to four bodies of water: Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, and Atlantic. Each class of spirits emerges on the LACMA homepage according to an astronomical event—solstice or equinox—rising gradually across a sequence of solar hours:

Winter Solstice (Pacific Ocean): December 21, 2025 | 12 am–11:59 pm PT
Spring Equinox (Indian Ocean): March 20, 2026
Summer Solstice (Mediterranean Sea): June 21, 2026
Autumn Equinox (Atlantic Ocean): September 22, 2026

gerrard’s practice has frequently confronted the infrastructures—oilfields, freeways, server farms—that shape contemporary life. Reflecting on these entanglements, he notes that “the 20th century haunts the 21st century,” a reminder that the political and industrial forces of the last century remain embedded in this world. Western Flag, held in LACMA’s collection, stages a perpetual plume of black smoke rising from Spindletop, Texas, the birthplace of the U.S. oil industry, transforming a historical extraction site into an powerful environmental monument. Likewise, washington.stream, also in LACMA’s collection, depicts an endless flow of freeway traffic as a pulsing stream of headlights and taillights which constitute a flag-like form. 

Designed specifically for the mobile web browser using WebGL technology, SPIRITS engages the cultural space of the phone. The intimacy of the handheld interface offers a counterpoint to the scale of the planetary issues the work evokes.

(opens in a new window) Learn more at LACMA.org.