john gerrard

A white-cheeked spider monkey sits alone at the edge of a forest, staring at a smartphone, unable to look away from its own image. The animal seems stuck in a loop, caught between its social media 'feed' and its need for food. Sometimes, the monkey looks up and meets your gaze. In that moment, the distance between the two of you disappears.

Ghost Feed unfolds as a real-time simulation built in a game engine; the scene is not a recording, but a world that is continuously generated, drawing on documentation of burning forests in Brazil and California, alongside archival images of war. The work follows the rhythm of a full year, showing time as it is lived rather than edited. It invites you to reflect on your own habits of looking and scrolling, and to think about how you spend your attention in an increasingly mediated environment, shaped by planetary crisis and algorithmic systems.

john gerrard is the museum’s first System Thinker. System Thinkers are invited to work with us and the city over longer periods of time, creating projects and programmes that explore new ways of thinking about the museum as an evolving system for civic, technological, and ecological imagination.