SPIRITS calls attention to the over consumption and reliance on forever chemicals and plastics. (image courtesy of the artist)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and artist john gerrard announce the Summer Solstice launch on June 21 of SPIRITS, the latest in a landmark year-long artwork commissioned by LACMA’s Art+Technology Lab and presented on LACMA’s homepage from Winter Solstice 2025 through Winter Solstice 2026.

Highlighting LACMA’s opening celebrations for the new David Geffen Galleries, gerrard presents SPIRITS Summer Solstice Dance, a live event on June 21 from 6-10 p.m. on the East West Bank Commons headlined by a DJ set from electronic music pioneer Richie Hawtin. The Summer Solstice event marks the debut of Peak Oil, an original psychoacoustic composition by gerrard. The event is free and open to the public with RSVP.

SPIRITS is a rumination on the world’s petroleum addiction, aimed at highlighting the over consumption of and reliance on forever chemicals and plastics. A digitally native interactive work, SPIRITS is the first institutional project to use gaussian splatting, a spatial imaging technology that composes objects from cloud-like points of data. The Summer Solstice launch marks the most significant public moment of gerrard’s most expansive year to date, and the first time in LACMA’s history that a major solo exhibition has been presented exclusively in the browser on LACMA’s homepage.

“On June 21 we welcome the extraordinary Richie Hawtin. We welcome thousands of dancers. We enter a form of participatory techno dance intersecting with both very old and very new knowledge, ecologies and power. We shall see where it takes us on solstice night on the beautiful new commons under the David Geffen Galleries at LACMA,” gerrard said.

“Bringing together Richie Hawtin’s pioneering approach to electronic music and john gerrard’s meditation on the world’s oceans, Spirits Summer Solstice Dance invites audiences to gather in celebration of the summer solstice, reflecting on the systems and cycles that connect us all,” said Joel Ferree, of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab.

Organized around four bodies of water and four astronomical events, SPIRITS transforms 96 discarded plastic sandals and shoes, collected along the shores of the Pacific, Indian, Mediterranean and Atlantic oceans, into luminous, interactive virtual sculptures rendered in real time in the browser. These are not images, not video and not AI. They are what gerrard calls image objects: dimensional, world-built sculptures crafted over two years, in which the physics of the Earth itself is embedded into each sculptural form. The viewer’s finger is the central cultural actor, each touch transforming the object with overlays of oil slicks, ocean currents and other forms.

The work unfolds in four 24-hour events, each released hour by hour across a single day, tracing a full solar year. SPIRITS is conceived as a full solar wheel, opening and closing on Dec. 21.

LACMA is located at 5905 Wilshire Blvd. For information, visit lacma.org.