John Gerrard

About the Project

Each of the 195 World Flag NFTs depicts a different UN member’s flag amid one of four future deserts that speak to the threats of the climate crisis—these landscapes include sandy, ash, cracked mud, and gravel deserts, all of which are generated randomly and uniquely using code-based frequencies, shapes, colors, and skies. In these scenes, which are set in the distant future, the various countries’ flags represent a lost global infrastructure, and the landscapes can be understood as specters of the past, of a depleted global ecology.

World Flag imagines a shared but bleak and deeply inequitable future in which ongoing governmental and legislative failures alongside environmental degradation and mismanagement have rendered the state as a ghost, an apparition of itself. The national flag is reimagined as a performed militaristic sign for a doomed place-based political order. When distributed using the blockchain mechanism and viewed on mobile electronic devices, the work and medium propose a global public art experience—post place, post geography.

Like Western Flag, the flags in Gerrard’s new artworks are made up of billowing clouds of smoke bursting from a flagpole. Unlike Western Flag, which features a jet-black flag of smoke, the World Flag artworks bear the true colors and symbols of the national flags they represent.

As with Petro National, World Flag engages the potential of temporal and spatial media online through game engine technology, connecting the worlds of WebGL and Web3. The scenes in every World Flag artwork run on the local times of the geographic centers of their respective countries, with light conditions in the works changing throughout the year in accordance with the seasons. Night and day are also experienced in the artworks. On a spatial level, the World Flag artworks can be viewed from various orientations by dragging on the screen.

The release of World Flag will coincide with Gerrard’s presentation of his new digital simulation Surrender (Flag) 2023 as part of the group exhibition Dear Earth: Art and Hope in a Time of Crisis at the Hayward Gallery in London, on view from June 21 to September 3. Presented in high resolution and featuring a white flag rendered in ephemeral vapors amid a desert landscape, this moving image work “looks to the future, towards ideas of stoppage, parlay and submission to larger planetary realities,” as the artist puts it. As such, Surrender (Flag) 2023—which depicts accurate, detailed representations of a real location near the Mojave Desert in Nevada—can be understood in conversation with World Flag. Further information about the Hayward Gallery’s upcoming presentation can be found (opens in a new window) here.

Gerrard will participate in a Twitter Spaces discussion with Art Blocks Founder and CEO Erick Calderon at 10 a.m. EDT on June 22. To mark the launch of World Flag, Art Blocks will host another talk with Gerrard on Twitter Spaces on June 28 at 12:30 p.m. EDT. The artist will also actively engage with the Art Blocks community on Discord in the lead up to the project launch. More information about World Flag can be found at (opens in a new window) artblocks.io.