SPIRITS, john gerrard's year-long commission for LACMA's Art + Technology Lab, is a browser-based work: 96 discarded plastic sandals collected from beaches worldwide, rendered as gaussian-splat sculptures and presented on LACMA's website across four 24-hour cycles tied to the solstices and equinoxes.
"The 20th century haunts the 21st century,"
john gerrard has said of the industrial and extractive infrastructures his work returns to (LACMA Unframed, Dec 11, 2025). SPIRITS takes that up directly: john gerrard and producers photoscanned found sandals into gaussian splats, a real-time rendering technique that reconstructs three-dimensional forms from photographs and streams them directly to the browser rather than playing back a fixed video or model. Each sandal appears overlaid with a shifting layer of oil, ocean current, or wildfire imagery that responds to touch, built for a handheld screen rather than a gallery wall.
The work continues john gerrard's two-decade practice of building simulations synced to real-world time and astronomical cycles, including Western Flag and washington.stream, both developed through LACMA's Art + Technology Lab. The full cycle runs across four events: Pacific (Winter Solstice, Dec 21 2025), Indian Ocean (Spring Equinox, Mar 20 2026), Mediterranean (Summer Solstice, Jun 21 2026), and Atlantic (Autumn Equinox, Sep 22 2026).
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