Daisy Chain: Where blockchain meets the real world, one link at a time

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As Arctic ice fractures, so too do the region's marine populations. Impacted by changing water temperature, salinity and availability of food, hundreds of species are leaving home.

Researchers as far south as Ireland – part of the broader North Atlantic marine ecosystem – are spotting Beluga whales and walruses, creatures that don’t typically stray beyond the sub-Arctic region. On land, rising sea levels are aggravating coastal erosion in Ireland and elsewhere.

The Irish artist John Gerrard spends his weekends with his husband, hiking through Ireland’s bucolic and shifting landscapes. His fascination with the “non-human world” began as a child in the Irish countryside. 

“We didn't have a TV,” he said, speaking from a sunlit kitchen in his Ireland home. “I remember lying in the long grass and just dreaming about stuff – thinking about flies and why they exist.”

Gerrard, 50, was one of seven children. His mother was a dedicated ecologist and musician. “She engaged me in quite a sophisticated dialogue about ecologies from a really young age.”

“This is where we’re going, so the robot is kind of that. But it’s also flow – data just flowing, you know, relentless in a way, and powerful.”

— John Gerrard

He continues that dialogue through his art. Considered a pioneer of simulation in contemporary art, Gerrard’s work lives in collections at MoMA, the Tate, LACMA and various other leading institutions. He’s featured at multiple Biennales, and he’s among the earliest artists to exhibit computer-generated works at Art Basel. Often, his work is climate-focused.

For Earth Day in 2017, Channel Four commissioned Gerrard to create Western Flag, a live simulation of Spindletop, Texas in 1901 – site of the world’s first major oil strike. The artist rendered a virtual flag of smoke that sits atop a virtual rendering of Spindletop Hill, which today is barren and exhausted. Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum exhibited the piece in conjunction with the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP25). It’s part of Gerrard’s portfolio of virtual worlds that offer commentary on real-life crises. 

In Gerrard’s latest project, crystalline work, a virtual robotic arm “based” in the North Pole creates real-time crystal patterns inspired by snowflakes. The robot, which began work on the summer solstice, finishes 24 pieces per day. Each one is tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain and sold for $100. Over the course of a year, the robot will generate 8,760 original pieces as non-fungible tokens (NFTs), making it the longest-running performance art project yet attempted using blockchain technology. 

Peruse Gerrard’s work on his web site.

Gerrard realized the potential of NFTs alongside much of the rest of the world. “For me, the bomb was Beeple,” he said, referencing the digital artist who in 2021 sold his piece “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days” for a staggering $69.3 million. “The absolute core for me was that the digital is valued.” 

Within a week of the Beeple sale, Gerrard had extracted a 30-second loop from Western Flag and minted it as an NFT, which now sits in LACMA’s collection.

That wasn’t his first encounter with the blockchain, though. The artist was invited to participate in the New Museum’s formative ‘Rhizome Seven on Seven’ conference, “where the NFT was effectively invented,” Gerrard said. 

“In a funny way, I was asking the question: ‘if Bitcoin is valuable because of how densely it’s encrypted, from whence does that encryption come from?’ And of course, it comes from the earth.”

— John Gerrard

He also took part in the blockchain-based a2p project, an artist-led online exchange curated by Casey Reas – founder of the NFT marketplace Feral File, which hosts crystalline work. “[a2p] works were tokenized on the Bitmark chain, but we didn't know it,” Gerrard said. “We didn't call them NFTs.”  

In 2018, Gerrard traveled to a mine in Sichuan, China, where much of the world’s Bitcoin was being produced by hydroelectric power. There he created “Stream,” which explores the “intersection between different forms of the stream – streams of energy, streams of power,” he said. “In a funny way, I was asking the question: ‘if Bitcoin is valuable because of how densely it's encrypted, from whence does that encryption come from?’ And of course, it comes from the earth.”

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On North America’s Eastern seaboard in the 19th century, Gerrard shared, farmland was abandoned en masse. Large-scale reforestation ensued, leading to a discernible drop in global temperature and further illuminating the imperative of trees.

John Gerrard and Matt Smith, founder of Hometree. Photograph by John Gerrard with assistance from Ruth Phillips.

A quarter of crystalline work’s proceeds are going to Hometree, a tree-planting charity focused on restoring a temperate rainforest in Ireland (if every NFT is sold, the piece will enable the planting of some 12,000 trees). 

“At the heart of the piece is this idea that if you support this experimental piece online, which plays with the idea of virtual ice, you may produce some real ice on the poles,” he said. “Because if you plant a tree, it starts to bring the temperature down.” 

Gerrard also cited more radical geoengineering proposals that might curb polar ice cap melt – like digging a trench to prevent warming water from touching the ice, or covering the Arctic in little glass balls that would reflect light back into space. “I was like, oh my God, environmental disaster in the making.”

“They're all very extravagant geo-techno-human ways to cool down the planet,” he said. “I always thought a more straightforward approach would be to tamp down consumption, you know what I mean? Or even just planting more trees.” 

2023 · WESTERN FLAG AT DARK MOFO
Photographer : Jesse Hunniford / Courtesy Dark MOFO

The most recent proposal, Gerrard said, was robotic drills that pump seawater from under the ice to make more ice. It inspired crystalline work’s robotic arm. “I suppose the robot is standing for all of the technology that's coming at us,” he said.

“A friend of mine was here from San Francisco the other day, and he showed me a video of a robotic taxi,” Gerrard quipped. “He was funny about it – he basically said he felt weirdly safer. He preferred it to a real human. It's so steady and there were no emotions. 

“And this is where we're going, so the robot is kind of that,” he continued, “But it’s also flow – data just flowing, you know, relentless in a way, and powerful.”

lead image: a crystalline work original