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.

Landscape and time have remained the subjects of many of Gerrard’s subsequent works, each of which can take him and his Austrian team up to six months to design. A series called “Smoke Trees,” begun in 2006, is based on individual specimens—from venerable oak to noble pine—growing near the artist’s childhood home in County Tipperary, in the south of Ireland. Gerrard constructs the trees the way he constructed the man in One Thousand Year Dawn, in the virtual round, and the viewer can simulate circling them by pivoting the screen. Instead of sprouting leaves and producing oxygen, however, the smoke trees cough up carbon emissions in gray clouds, inverting actual conditions on either side of the nature-culture divide for an age of accelerating climate change and seemingly rampant natural disaster. Dust Storm (Dalhart, Texas, USA)—seen in the group show last summer at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York—similarly invokes ecology. In the 2007 animation, an ominous tempest looms on the horizon of a rural grassland. The work’s panoramic view comes from photographs the artist shot on location, the image of the storm from 1930s archival photos of the Dust Bowl, which resulted from the confluence of cyclical drought and the reckless expansion of agricultural activity made possible by fossil fuel–powered farm equipment. But Gerrard devised the algorithm that defines the dark cloud’s roiling by looking at video of a dust storm in Anbar Province in Iraq, taken by an American soldier. In a strange reversal, Dust Storm makes our contemporary thirst for oil, and an attendant blindness to its effects on the world, animate a historic catastrophe in the panhandle of George W. Bush’s home state, a disaster that was likewise driven by oil, rapaciousness, and willful ignorance of the consequences.