On March 20, the spring equinox, the next phase of SPIRITS rises on LACMA's homepage: 24 pieces found on the shores of the Indian Ocean.

SPIRITS is a browser-based artwork by artist john gerrard unfolding across the year, tied to the four solstices and equinoxes. The entire work includes 96 real-time simulations of found plastic sandals and shoes collected from beaches across the world, scanned and rendered as a new form of spatial photography called gaussian splat simulations. Beautiful and toxic, they embody sunlight locked in petroleum, transformed by touch into cultural and ecological narratives.

Over the course of the equinox, 24 works ascend hour by hour, each representing a discarded or lost plastic sandal or shoe. Each carries an unknowable story of labor, leisure, tourism, migration, or accident before washing ashore. In this spring iteration, the faint iridescent shimmer of the project’s earlier winter solstice phase gives way to thicker, glossier surfaces. What the artist calls ecological and cultural “tipping points” run through the work. Each visual state marks a threshold: iridescence deepens into luscious gloss, which intensifies into the saturated palette of acid house. As the year turns toward summer, the surfaces darken. A deep ocean blue bleeds and bruises before bursting into flame. For a brief moment the work takes on the appearance of a hyper-polished commodity before tipping toward a charred void—a cremation-like transformation that, like a forest fire, carries the possibility of renewal.

A generative soundtrack mirrors these shifts. Where winter moved through minimal engine-like tones and distant digital choirs, spring introduces rhythm and melody. Beats circulate through the evolving soundscape, moving from house to techno before opening into a spacious, late-night pulse where imagination takes root.

SPIRITS is designed for the mobile web browser as a work of global public art. Objects are rendered live in the browser, not as fixed video or conventional 3D scans, but as data in transit, forming and dissolving as viewers encounter them. The user’s finger becomes “a central cultural actor,” tapping, swiping, and rotating animate the work, placing the public’s consuming gesture at the center of the experience. As the artist has noted, “If artists do not meet the next generation where they are—on the network, on the phone—art as we know it will dry up. The phone is a cultural space of great poetic and transformative power.”

SPIRITS occupies this space while suggesting that information alone may not resolve the climate crisis, but vision might. The work approaches the lingering presence of the 20th-century oil age in the 21st not through data or explanation, but through poetry, movement, and beauty. Its aim is to move people and to consider how they live, how they consume, and what they might ask for next. 

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The Lab is part of a long‑term partnership between Hyundai Motor Company and LACMA that explores the evolving relationship between art and technology.