JY&A 2020 Winter Art Salon | John F. Simon Jr.: Unfolding Moments

About

As a pioneer of software art, John F. Simon Jr. has explored new media art and challenged traditional notions of painting and drawing since the mid-1980s. Simon’s way of creating art is quite unique: he starts with drawings and makes the drawing process the object of meditation instead of identifying a subject beforehand. He revisits his improvisational drawings—which he calls “divination drawings”—and reworks these ideas, often by programming. Simon considers programming as a two-fold kind of creative writing, first in the sense of writing poems or stories but secondly recognizing that the computer screen is where the program creates images. In this way, Simon discovers a world full of surprises and novelty. The meanings of his artworks are open-ended and imbued with possibilities.