John Gerrard, Irish
Still image from Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma), 2015
John Gerrard’s digitally rendered model of a data center in Pryor Creek, Oklahoma, critically confronts our perceptions of the visual and virtual landscapes of the twenty-first century. Gerrard’s work pictures the tangible infrastructure of artificial intelligence that is often invisible, showing us the novel architecture of data centers that now exist throughout a range of communities within the US. The production of this work using a digital simulation challenges the viewer to think about how artists can render the virtual worlds that the unremarkable industrial structures of data centers hold within. In producing a digital work depicting the very source of its production, John Gerrard recursively questions the changing relationship between digital art and data extraction. Label by William Armacost