"(Simon's) work is unique for a number of reasons. First of all, he makes explicit connections in his pieces between the new ideas of new media and various traditions, movements and figures of modern art, in particular Mondrian, Klee, and Sol Levitt. Given that art world and culture at large are still largely treating new media as a phenomena in itself which has no connections to the past, Simon’s explicit and systematic explorations of conceptual linkages between new media and modern art is very important. In addition, while new media art field has been rapidly growing in size over the last years, and while artists in all disciplines are now routinely computer as a tool in their work, there are still literally only a few artists out there who focus on one of the most fundamental and radical concepts associated with digital computers – that of computation itself (rather than interactivity, network, or multimedia). Simon systematically researches how real-time computation can be used to create engaging artworks which are both conceptual and strongly material, offering the viewer rich visual experiences. In his earlier work online piece Every Icon (1998) and his wall-mounted pieces included in Bitstreams exhibition at the Whitney Museum (2001) Whitney uses real-time computation to create artworks that have a starting point in time but no end point; as the time progresses, they constantly change. While we can find certain precedents for such artworks in modern art (for instance, kinetic art, early computer art of the 1960s, and conceptual art), Simon pursues a unique strategy of his own: he uses artificial life, cellular automata and other computational techniques to create complex and nuanced images which combine figurative and abstract and which explicitly insert themselves within the history of modernist visual research."
Lev Manovich, Data Visualisation as New Abstraction and Anti-Sublime
In John Simon's Art, Everything Is Possible
an article from numeral.com
Simon is the creator of "Every Icon," a thought-provoking work of computer-based conceptual art that was unveiled last month on the World Wide Web.
When first viewed, "Every Icon" looks deceptively plain, a seemingly simple square that has been partitioned into 1,024 smaller squares, 32 to a side. The monochromatic grid that results takes up about one-tenth of a monitor screen, a miniaturist's delight.
Loading a Web page displaying "Every Icon" launches a Java applet that, as it runs, begins to explore successively every combination of black and white squares that could occur within the confines of the grid's tightly circumscribed space.
As the tiny squares change from light to dark and back again, the black boxes appear to hop progressively toward the right. Over time, the grid will fill up and recognizable shapes, familiar images and perhaps even a little art are destined to materialize -- however briefly -- from the visual noise of the jitterbugging boxes.
Don't expect that to happen anytime soon, though.
On a reasonably fast Pentium-powered PC that can flash 100 different combinations per second, Simon estimated, it would take about 16 months to display all of the 4.3 billion variations on the top line of the grid. Because the number of possibilities literally expands exponentially, the second line would be completed in roughly 6 billion years.
Rounded off and expressed mathematically, the total number of conceivable variations within the grid is 1.8 multiplied by 10 to the 308th power (for purposes of comparison, 1 billion is a measly 10 to the 9th). For the grid to become totally black, the last "icon" that the applet is programmed to exhibit, Simon calculated that it would merely take several hundred trillion years.
"Because there's no word for that amount of time and no word for that large a number, several hundred trillion years is my way of making you think about a very, very long time," the 34-year-old artist said in a telephone interview from his Manhattan home.
"But in several trillion years, you might start to see something that looks like an arrow, or a square. You would arrive at something that was a skewed square, and then a few trillion years later it would be straight, and then a few trillion years later it would be crooked," Simon said.
While more computing power would hasten the process, it might also make the work impossible to see. "What does it mean to look at something that changes a billion times a second? It becomes a human perceptual limit," Simon said.
Given the cramped space, two-tone palette and strict rectilinearity of "Every Icon," anything resembling a late-period Monet is unlikely to wash over a retina anytime soon.
Even within these rigorously defined parameters, "Every Icon" will automatically generate more images than could possibly be assimilated in a lifetime.
"There was a lot of talk at the end of the 80's when post-modernism was emerging about how we've reached the end of imaging," he said, "and I wanted to show that even in a simple 32-by-32 space, the possibilities for imaging were vast."
Most of the images will have no value, a realization which in turn deepens one's appreciation for the range of choices that artists must confront and discard daily.
Simon asserted that today's trash could become tomorrow's iconic treasure. For example, a broken line might evolve in 150 generations to signify an international symbol of distress. "We could be looking at something that has meaning, but because of who we are and what we are now, we might not recognize it," he said.
"An autonomous image has lost its authority in a lot of ways these days," he continued. "A photograph can be manipulated, and we see so many images. Maybe I want to present the conditions in which an image can happen, as opposed to saying this is my image."
Musing on "Every Icon" as it flickers away in a browser window, one begins to sense that Simon's creation is much more than a cleverly constructed mathematical exercise or a modest electronic meditation on the eternal nature of the creative urge.
Indeed, the work is suggestive of the efforts of such well-known students of the square as Josef Albers and Paul Klee. Its closest affinity is to the kinetic colored compositions of Piet Mondrian, as found in "Broadway Boogie Woogie."
Sandra Gering, who will present a show of Simon's art in her Soho gallery next year, agreed. "I'm attracted to John's work because he is constantly looking back to go forward," she said. "For instance, he looks at artists such as Klee and then applies some of their principles to his own work. This brings a sense of art history to his pieces, even though they are technologically based."
"John is not caught in the trap of making work that is cold and removed, as so often happens with computer art," she remarked. "He is able to make especially powerful work using the new media because this is the tool that is most comfortable and natural for him."
Simon is a native of Louisiana, where his mother is a mathematician and his father is a judge. He learned to program while earning a master's degree in earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis. He also holds a master's degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, where he later taught.
As a programmer, he has collaborated on the development of such high-profile Web-art projects as Jenny Holzer's "Please Change Beliefs,"Lawrence Weiner's "Homeport," and Kolmar and Melamid's notorious The Most Wanted Paintings.
Now, Simon is working full time on his own projects. "You get to an age when you're just going to try as best you can or you're not going to do it," he said. "I've made about $500 so far, which is more than I've made (as an artist) any other year. And I'm still going."
Simon is selling numbered, registered editions of "Every Icon" for $20, with the applet distributed via e-mail as a file attachment. Adhering to the economics of the Web, the cost is relatively low and the edition is unlimited. To date, there have been 16 buyers.
Because Java runs on multiple computing platforms, Simon also has installed a copy on his Pilot personal organizer. "I go to a party sometimes and people say, 'What do you do?' and I pull out my Pilot and say, 'This is my artwork,'" Simon related. "Some people go 'Oh, wow, that's incredible' and some people go 'When do I see a picture?'"
Simon acknowledged that "Every Icon" is a computer-based restatement of an idea that has been around a long time. He cited "The Library of Babel," as envisioned in the Jorge Luis Borges short story, an institution that contains every written word.
And there is the as-yet unfulfilled prospect that a cage of monkeys with typewriters and an infinite amount of time will someday pound out the complete works of Shakespeare.
Is "Every Icon" Shakespeare or, for that matter, Rembrandt? Let's hang out for several hundred trillion years and find out.
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