John F. Simon Jr. (American, b. 1963) writes custom software that treats programming as a medium for drawing, generating compositions from simple rules that evolve and change over time.,He has written his own software since the 1980s. His practice moved from pen-plotter drawings through internet art and wall-mounted sculptures to computer-fabricated bas-relief pieces. He produces new artworks each year, exhibited internationally and acquired by museums.
Simon was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and studied geology and fine art at Brown University, earning a BA and a BS in 1985. He completed an MA in Earth and Planetary Science at Washington University in St. Louis in 1987 and earned an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1989. He lives and works in Manhattan.Since the late 1990s he has started each day with meditation and drawing, producing a series he calls the Divination Drawings.
His first net art project, Alter Stats (1995–98), visualized the interactions of early online computer networks. Every Icon (1997), sold as a numbered software edition for $20 apiece at gallery openings, came with a license agreement specifying resale royalties, tracked through a public ledger of owners on his website.The work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000, one of the first software-based works shown in that context, and led to acquisitions by the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art.In 2000, at the time of the dot-com crash, Simon created ComplexCity, a semi-autobiographical array of urban abstractions combining nine programs on one screen and drawing on the streets and skyline around his New York studio. In 2023 he reworked ComplexCity into a 512-piece generative collection with Artwrld and Art Blocks Engine, using ChatGPT to help translate its original code.Unfolding Object (2002), an interactive web artwork, was restored by the Guggenheim Museum as part of its Conserving Computer-Based Art initiative.
In 2020, during the Covid-19 shutdown, he conceived Drawing Air, a software work depicting two mirrored trees that pulse and grow into forms resembling a pair of lungs.The work gave its title to his first solo exhibition at David Richard Gallery in New York, running October 7 to November 8, 2020, alongside twelve sculptural wall works continuing his Innerhole series, begun in 2010.,His work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Phillips Collection, the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Collezione Maramotti, and he is represented by Sandra Gering Inc.
