A solitary figure stands on a beach at sunrise. Wearing jeans and a hoodie, he stares out to sea, arms crossed over his chest. He breathes, blinks, and periodically shifts his weight; waves lap softly at the sand. But apart from these subtle movements, the image remains perfectly still. No matter how long you look, the young man never leaves his watch; the sun never climbs above the horizon.

All this takes place on a flat-screen monitor in John Gerrard’s One Thousand Year Dawn (Marcel) (2005), the first in a continuing series of works by the Irish artist that employ advanced software developed for computer games. In One Thousand Year Dawn, both figure and landscape were carefully built up, bit by bit and pixel by pixel, before being animated with naturalistic motion. Gerrard allows the viewer to navigate within the universe he’s created—albeit only along a circumscribed path around the figure—by swiveling the monitor; as the screen, clad in white Corian, rotates on a pin, the scene pans almost a full 360 degrees. Yet as much as his image evokes a photograph quickened by some spark of life, or a film congealed to near immobility, it never quite settles on being either, keeping the slightly cartoonish visual trace of its origins in digital rendering. We might even think of Gerrard’s works as sculptures—virtual, to be sure, but modeled in the studio in three dimensions to form a satisfying likeness of the real world. The artist himself calls the genre-bending realm in which he works a “postcinematic slipping space between the image and the object.”

Gerrard did, in fact, receive a degree in sculpture from the Ruskin School at the University of Oxford in 1997, before graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Trinity College, Dublin. His first experiments with game technology began soon after. For an online work from 2003, Slow Fall, he appropriated a collapsing soldier from a video game called Unreal Tournament—a “found object,” the artist calls it—and altered its speed to make an oblique commentary on the then nascent war in Iraq. In Gerrard’s version the death throes of the soldier take 20 days, the approximate length of time between the US invasion and the stage-managed toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square. Unlike film and video, which are bound by conventions of editing and limited by the length of a reel or tape, Gerrard’s programs run continuously in real time, endlessly unfolding on the same terms as our own. As a result, even when slowed down, his creations, far more than works in other mediums, seem endowed with a semblance of autonomous life.

One Thousand Year Dawn marked a great leap forward in terms of Gerrard’s use of technology. It was also the first project he made with his current team of technicians, based in Vienna. But like Slow Fall, it too depends on his manipulation of duration for its emotional heft. The thousand years of the title denotes the millennium it will take for the sun to rise above the horizon in Gerrard’s program, hence its essential motionlessness from our perspective. The figure in the work was modeled on an Austrian actor friend, the titular Marcel, chosen as a kind of youthful Everyman; he was also about the same age as the artist’s younger brother, who had committed suicide two years earlier. The work thus functions in part as a memorial, and the man on the beach keeps the dawn vigil of Irish mourning traditions. At the same time, he stands in for Gerrard’s brother, preserved virtually forever, expectantly awaiting the start of a new day. It is almost as poignant to imagine the care that would have to be expended, generation upon generation, to keep One Thousand Year Dawn running for 10 centuries as it is to picture the young man watching the sunrise for an eternity, until finally, the morning having at last arrived, he turns, walks down the strand, and disappears, leaving the work to exist forever after as an empty landscape.