Artist John Gerrard is known for building real-time virtual worlds and simulations – on view in public space and often centered on energy, power, and ecology – using game-engine technology. Since winter 2025, his project SPIRITS – 96 software 'art worlds' each built around a lost plastic shoe he found on the shores of the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean, or Atlantic and transformed into a 3D image called a Gaussian splat – has unfolded across the landing page of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in four movements. By touching their screens, viewers can spin infinitely variable stories within these 'worlds.'

'Each 'ocean' was released on lacma.org for 24 hours – a new work every hour from midnight till midnight – to coincide with a solar event: 'Pacific' on the winter solstice in 2025, 'Indian' in spring 2026, 'Mediterranean' in June alongside a solstice rave with techno DJ Richie Hawtin under LACMA's new David Geffen Galleries, and now 'Atlantic.' As the piece's final chapter goes online, Gerrard writes in his own words about the work, and speculates on our networked age's many potentials.

SPIRITS (Pacific) on December 21, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Can screens replace art galleries?

The smartphone is a vast cultural platform dominated by social-media giants. Nonetheless, even in this doomscape of short-form videos, there is something deeply powerful in digital touch – a complex, intimate electromagnetic relation between finger and screen. Two-dimensional media does little with digital touch aside from dragging the feed. That will likely change. I am also interested in what I call the dimensional web. With the Gaussian splat, a camera phone can produce compelling, shimmering dimensional worlds in a few shots. Processed on the phone, these become ‘image objects’ that viewers can look around and, with artistic intervention, can become painterly, or musical instruments of sorts, or sites of performance.

Most of all, the public gains more agency over these online forms. Art culture now is strongly tied to place: brick-and-mortar museums, galleries, biennials, things placed in rooms. And now we have this extraordinarily powerful global network changing everything all around us. I sense growing tensions between network and place, culturally. How should wider contemporary art deal with networks? How might a commercial gallery that supports artists and collectors respond to these changes?

How NFTs gave art value

I have replaced the term ‘NFT’ with ‘art token’ – a thing of immense value to me and to my digital art community. It allowed, finally, digital art a more substantial place somehow. Things flow from the blockchain art token as an organizing structure: title, date, proof, description, provenance, the art or art software itself. An early step for me was creating the series ‘Petro National’ and ‘World Flag’ for Art Blocks x Pace Verso in 2022–2023, which continue to be actively collected now. More recently, for my triptych of flag works at Zero 10 in Basel in 2026 with Fellowship, three existing software editions were assigned a token, granting access to the works’ software through a token-gated archive we are establishing. The collector who acquired those three works will not collect digital art in any other way than through art tokens, and they’re far from alone – thus there is not an explicit bust right now. If you do not have a digital wallet, you may be missing what this thing means in 2026.

Why AI cannot do it all

SPIRITS is human-labor-intensive: The human back-and-forth that makes it can’t be replicated by AI. This intensity gives the work its qualities, which have to do with perception, experience, and feeling. The works are made by hand in dialogue with the computer. Take virtual petroleum running over a plastic shoe: We code and iterate for weeks to make SPIRITS (Atlantic), the feeling getting closer each day. The border, the bevel, the reflection, the metallic qualities – we continue until they are right, and then the art functions. The people I work with are certainly using AI and agents – it is powerful, but it is not enough in itself.

Conventional and digital art worlds: coming together or growing apart?

We must be careful of terms here – no interesting art world is conventional. There’s dull art everywhere, but then suddenly something vivid and unexpected dazzles everyone. My hunch: collectors are increasingly drawn to both digital art and possibly the art token mechanism, and galleries will continue to respond. Digital art is culturally and socially important now, and it is not sufficient for artists to represent digital conditions through other mediums; rather, they need to work within and through the digital. The artists need that, society needs it, and collectors need it too.

Future art audiences – who'll watch next?

Contemporary art emerges from and responds to contemporary conditions and work which takes on the crackle of this will be of broad interest to young, adventurous audiences. Change is the only constant, and we will see it accelerate in the next decades.

Humans also have a deep need to gather, especially if they are mostly communicating via networks day to day. So I sense that gathering points such as Art Basel Zero 10 will be important for digital artists and audiences. Biennials will continue to pull large audiences of course, but those audiences may seek less analog work and more fluidity between real and unreal worlds. I see huge potential in electronic dance and the performative – perhaps there is scope there for more convergence. Digital networks, platforms, and artworks online will likely be a bigger part of contemporary art’s future, felt through increasingly global and distributed ­art audiences in the next decade or so.

The shape of things to come

I am involved with the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven as a ‘System Thinker’ for the next few years, and we will likely summarize SPIRITS with a big dance where all the seasons are performed. So long as the world has not entirely stopped and if I am still moving through it, I see continuity. I love galleries and physical spaces, and expect I’ll keep coating walls with earthen paint, such as at Zero 10, and putting up screens so virtual worlds reach a broad public and continuing to expand into networks. In the end it’s all art, it’s all culture, it’s all gathering and exchange, and those who wish to take part will do so as audience, as patron, as collector.

As for the latter, ephemeral digital works are very interesting to collect, and there is a strange solidity to seeing your personal art software collection gathered in your own online gallery. I expect that aspect will only grow more powerful and more valuable. Outside of social collapse, which we strive to avoid, things may be a little like now in 20 years – just a bit less object-oriented, more energetic and fluid. We shall see.