→ @john__gerrard shares the book that changed him Art Basel published an article on July 8, 2026 featuring four artists with current exhibitions on the books that shaped them most, and what they're reading this summer. Among them was artist, john gerrard. Gerrard named Manuel DeLanda's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (1991) as the book that most changed his thinking. He arrived at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford in 1994 at age 20 and found the book in his second year. DeLanda traces the history of war and technology in the years after the Gulf War, when Gerrard says power became abstract and cognitive structure began transferring from humans to machines. Gerrard had watched the Gulf War on television in his boarding school common room as a teenager, which he says primed him to think about violence and technology before he encountered the book. He credits it with introducing him to criticality and shaping his practice since, particularly his focus on society viewed through computing. His original copy is still on his bookshelf. For summer reading, Gerrard is revisiting Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind (1986) in the studio, and rereading Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) on the beach. His exhibition SPIRITS is on view online at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through December 21, 2026. (1-Portrait of John Gerrard by Lance Gerber. 2- Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, 1991.)