Farm (Council Bluffs, Iowa) 2015, Edition 1/4
Farm (Council Bluffs, Iowa) 2015 is a simulated portrait of a major data centre in the US - joining an earlier portrait of a related server building in Oklahoma titled Farm (Pryor Creek, Oklahoma) 2015.
The building, which houses many thousands of internet servers was created by the Google company and processed a significant portion of the global information load. Working with a team of modellers and technicians the visually and conceptually intricate structure is remade by hand as a hyper realistic simulated world. Animated through the use of a gaming engine the building shifts from a physical reality to a model. The camera in the resultant world moves profoundly slowly, both revealing and appearing to scan the site. On one side of the building one finds banks of diesel generators – running continuously, rooting the scene in the wider petroleum economy, on the other side banks of powerful cooling towers. Lights flood the scene at night. As is typical in these works the building is placed in a secondary light orbit of a year, allowing night and day to travel over the portrait across an annual cycle.
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, 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.
Extending the artists series 'Grow Finish Units' which consists of portraits within simulated space of visually similar pork production units on the mid-western landscape, 'Farm (Council Bluffs, Iowa) 2015' continues a long standing project of documenting what the artist describes as 'energetic' realities toward an analysis of contemporary power and life.
Farm (Council Bluffs, Iowa) 2015 exists in a fixed and immutable edition of 4 + 2 artist's proofs (AP). The edition was established in 2015 and is not expanded or altered by tokenization. Each edition is accompanied by a paper based certificate of authenticity or a blockchain art token 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 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.
Produced by Werner Poetzelberger
Programmed by Helmut Bressler
Modeled by Max Loegler
Project photography by Travis Hall
Game engine by Unigine