Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017

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Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 is a real-time digital simulation responding to the Lucas Gusher in Spindletop, Texas, the site of the world's first major oil find. Using a video game engine, the artwork depicts a flagpole endlessly spewing thick, dark carbon smoke in the shape of a flag. It serves as both a monument to the petrochemical age and a haunting visual warning about the invisible, borderless threat of human-induced climate change. Commissioned originally for Earth Day by Channel 4 Television, UK, the piece connects the dawn of fossil fuel consumption with its long-term environmental consequences. The smoke functions as a "warning flag," giving visible form to invisible carbon emissions and their potential to destabilise both society at large and the nation state. Following its release the work was shared globally as a video meme becoming in time an iconic work of climate protest. It is the first in a triptych of flag works tracing petroculture across past, present, and future: Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 looked to the past, Flare (Oceania) 2022 confronts the present, rendering burning emissions over a heating Pacific and 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 in Texas, 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. Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas) 2017 exists in a fixed and immutable edition of 4 + 2 artist's proofs (AP). The edition was established in 2017 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 1080 x 1080 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. Producer: Werner Poetzelberger Programmer: Helmut Bressler Modelers: Max Loegler, Philipp Marcks Game Engine: Unigine Commissioned by Channel 4, UK