Richie Hawtin and John Gerrard Turn Plastic Waste into a Shared Meditation at LACMA

At the newly opened David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, Richie Hawtin recently performed alongside SPIRITS, a year-long digital artwork by John Gerrard that confronts society’s dependence on plastic. The piece uses high-resolution simulations of thousands of discarded shoes collected from beaches worldwide. On screen, the footwear slowly breaks down into rippling oil, a process viewers can influence through their own mobile devices.

Hawtin, who served as creative advisor on the project’s score, structured a live set around Gerrard’s visual loop. The pair’s intersecting histories—Gerrard discovered techno in the early ’90s, and Hawtin has long cited mid-century abstractionists like Rothko and Judd as studio influences—fed a performance that sought the meeting point between sound and image, analog signal and digital decay.

“For our collaboration at LACMA, John and I will explore the meeting point between sight & sound, rhythm & repetition and analog vs. digital,” Hawtin said in a statement.

The work, accessible online through 2026, places the consequences of mass consumption inside a framework more common to clubs than galleries. It extends Hawtin’s career-long push to take electronic music beyond the dancefloor—from the Guggenheim to his PLAYdifferently project—while Gerrard continues to deploy emerging imaging technology as a tool for ecological reflection.