Son[i]a #289 John Gerrard

This podcast is part of Re-Imagine Europe, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Library music produced by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros and Stephen Sharp at Ina GRM (Paris). Script and production by Roc Jiménez de Cisneros.

Although he initially trained as an artist at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, John Gerrard soon broke away from traditional methods and forms of representation. Decades later, the work of Gerrard and his team of specialists is only tangentially related to portraiture, landscape, and representation.

His three-dimensional simulations, meticulously orchestrated in video game engines, recreate hybrid worlds that are part real, part fiction, depict inaccessible places, and draw attention to power relations and invisible macroeconomic processes. At the same time, they challenge the temporal and narrative codes of conventional film and video art. Software created to generate impossible scenes, which unfold on a time scale (months, years) that elevates them to the category of the unfathomable.

In this podcast, John Gerrard talks about his initial fascination with 3D scanners and about how they led him to develop his current practice, about his conception of time in art, and a particular way of understanding simulation: somewhere between contemplation and the critical gaze.