A series of generative art by Irish artist John Gerrard is helping to restore Ireland’s temperate rainforest. Hosted by Feral File, an online digital art platform founded in 2020, the series, titled “crystalline work”, offers dozens of collectible digital works per day for the next 12 months. The case was made public on June 18.
“This job is, above all, an experience,” Gerrard said. ARTnews. “In a virtual world on a pontoon at the Arctic North Pole, a robot – which I call a prismatic robot because its surface changes color every millisecond – creates 24 works every day, from the summer solstice of 2024 to the summer solstice 2025. The works are derived from a JavaScript ice generation algorithm that I found online 20 years ago.
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Gerrard describes the project as a “global data performance”. When asked what exactly that meant, he explained that it was “a piece of public art accessible to anyone on earth through the browser.”
A link on the Feral File website leads to a video of the digital robot diligently running the algorithm in real time, to create “crystal rod arrays”. Once completed, these networks are added to the Feral File gallery as “unique, dynamic, tokenized works of art from the Web 3D Graphics Library (WebGL),” according to the platform’s announcement.
By next year’s summer solstice, 8,760 works of art will have been created, each tokenized on the Ethereum blockchain and available for purchase for $100 apiece, or 0.026 ETH. “Works can be assembled by collectors to create longer performances using the Feral File app,” the platform noted in its announcement.
Digital artists such as Refik Anadol, Lu Yang, Rick Silva and 0xDEAFBEEF have in the past exhibited with Feral File, which aspires to offer “a new type of collecting experience, connecting otherwise unaffiliated and previously unaffiliated artists, curators and collectors disconnected.”
Twenty-five percent of profits from the “crystal work” will be donated to Hometree, a charity dedicated to restoring a 4,000-acre lost rainforest in Connemara, Ireland.
“John’s commitment to the natural world is significant and will certainly be remembered in time,” said Matt Smith, CEO of Hometree. ARTnews. “We have been working together for three years, and each time he brings a new strategy that often exceeds my understanding of the digital art space. This time, as always, his approach is ambitious, but he keeps his promises. He is an extraordinary man with a unique mind and I personally love his art. Working with someone who has such in-depth knowledge of the climate crisis and biodiversity loss is a pleasure.
Every day, the robot will create enough artwork to fund the planting of 33 trees in Ireland.
Each work is accompanied by an “annual generative soundtrack” created in collaboration with Tone.js, a company that helps people create interactive music in the browser. “The influence of soundtracks is a sound bath, like a Tibetan sound bath. In summer, the sounds are higher, while in winter, the tone is lower,” explained Gerrard. Moreover, he added, “this is not media work, it has nothing to do with the media. This is data work. There are no recorded elements and the sounds come from a code-derived choral piece.
A 4,000-pixel image file of the generated crystal bar arrays, which Gerrard calls “archetypes,” is embedded in each work and can be exported and printed in pigment on paper. Each work also contains a 3D model of the unique crystal arrangement, “which can be exported for use in 3D prints or in building a virtual world.”
“John has been pushing the boundaries of art for decades and the ‘Crystalline Work’ is his most ambitious and thought-provoking work to date,” Feral File co-founder Casey Reas said in a statement. “It’s exquisite work, from the ideas, to the final simulation, to the direct impact on the restoration of Ireland’s temperate rainforest.”