Gas Wars

Gas Wars is 500 generative works I made with Jalil Wahdatehagh, released on Art Blocks on 17 September 2025. Each one is a diagram of an aircraft marked by a simulated burst of fire. Some planes carry a few holes. Some are riddled. The subject is survivorship bias, the mistake of judging from only the examples still standing.

The release was part of the work. Token 0, the unmarked survivor, was auctioned first. Tokens 1 to 499 then went on sale for 500 seconds, priced by their numbers, one per wallet. The program decides where the bullets land. The collector decides only which plane to take, and does it under a clock.

Thomas Crow's essay "Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol", published in Art in America in May 1987, argues against reading Warhol's disaster pictures as neutral. He looks at the Tunafish Disaster paintings of 1963, which repeat an A&P tuna can above newspaper photographs of the people the contents were suspected of killing. He says they commemorate a moment when the supermarket promise of safe and abundant packaged food was disastrously broken. Does the rendition make it safely neutral, he asks. He thinks not.

The same goes for the car crashes. Crow describes the American car of the 1950s, the supreme symbol of consumer affluence, ceasing to be an image of pleasure and freedom and becoming an instrument of sudden and irreparable injury. About the repetition, he asks whether it might suggest the grim predictability, day after day, of more events with an identical outcome.

Gas Wars repeats one kind of picture 500 times, and each plane records where its burst of fire landed. The damage is the information. So is what the surviving image leaves out.

The release left something out too. A wallet whose mint failed is absent from the record of who got a plane. On 30 September 2025 I proposed an access token for holders and for those wallets, so the people missing from the mint record would be included.

Art Blocks' announcement predicted competition for the cheaper, less damaged planes. That is a prediction. Nothing here shows collectors behaved that way.