Flare (Oceania) 2022

Ethereum Mainnet·0x3F74...39De

Flare (Oceania) features a gas flare burning in the form of a flag over the South Pacific Ocean near Tonga. Based on ocean photography by Tongan activist and artist Uili Lousi, the work meditates on the existential threat that heating oceans pose to low-lying lands and on the economic and geopolitical forces driving the climate crisis. It is the second in a triptych of flag works tracing petroculture across past, present, and future: Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 looks to the past, simulating a dark flag of smoke on the site of the Lucas Gusher oil strike in Texas USA. Flare (Oceania) 2022 confronts the present, rendering burning emissions over a heating Pacific. STANDARD, 2023 turns toward the future, simulating a flag composed of water vapor rather than smoke or carbon emissions. The artwork is a real-time software simulation, not a video. Built on a game engine, it generates every frame live at approximately 50 frames per second, with no two moments ever repeating. The simulation is locked to the computer's clock: the sun rises and sets at the exact times it would at the depicted location near Tonga, and day lengths shift with the seasons across a full 365-day cycle. To own and display the work, the collector downloads and runs this software on a local PC. Flare (Oceania) 2022 exists in a fixed and immutable edition of 5 + 3 artist's proofs (AP). The edition was established in 2022 and is not expanded or altered by tokenization. Each edition is accompanied by a paper based certificate of authenticity or a blockchain token (NFT) on the Ethereum network, which serves as the on-chain certificate of authenticity and proof of ownership for that edition. This token is represented on-chain by a proofing still image stored on Ethereum. A 1920 x 1920 video proof compresses one day of the simulation from pre-dawn to dusk into a single viewing, revealing the work's time-bound behaviour as the light shifts across the full arc of the day. Neither the still nor the video proof constitutes the artwork. The online archive of the work is sustained into perpetuity by the john gerrard Estate. Produced by Werner Poetzelberger Programmed by Helmut Bressler Ocean photography by Uili Lousi Game engine by Unigine Commissioned by Bridgitt Evans