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Can a machine produce every possible image? What are the limits of this kind of automation? Is it possible to practice image making by exploring all image-space using a computer rather than by recording from the world around us? What does it mean that one may discover visual imagery so detached from "nature"? John F. Simon Jr.’s early software artwork, Every Icon (1997), was his initiation into a concept that forms the foundation of his current software artwork. The idea is that simple rules, activated and displayed on a screen, create more images than anyone can ever see in his or her lifetime.

John F. Simon considers software writing to be a kind of creative writing. He activates time-based simulations and studies their emergent properties to discover new forms and compositions.  His software artworks are displayed on anything from wall-mounted LCD screens and projectors to cell phones and handheld computers. He also uses his own software to make drawings on paper, plastic and formica, thus combining the digital with the hand-made in hybrid compositions. Moving between instinct and idea, each composition merges the physicality of the material world with the fluid inner world of code. The LCD screen functions simultaneously as a visual element of the surface and as a window into the system's evolution. The endless variability of the software evokes new connotations of what is infinite when seen against the dimensionality and texture of materials.

John Simon's work has been included in the Whitney Museum's 2000 Biennial and Bitstreams in 2001. He was selected to  receive the Aldrich Museum Trustee's Award for an Emerging Artist in fall 2000. His software panel works have been collected by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

John F. Simon (b. 1963, USA) holds an MFA degree from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and a Masters degree in Earth and Planetary Sciences from Washington University in St. Louis. He lives in New York City with his wife and two children.