Simon De Mai is an interdisciplinary artist and art director whose work investigates the physical qualities and imperfections of his materials, from experimental print techniques like cyanotypes to software anomalies and custom-built tools. By day a freelance designer working in the creative industry, he works at night as a creative programmer and video artist.
Growing up in a small town in Europe, De Mai felt he belonged with neither artists nor technologists, and he enrolled in design school instead. A workshop led by the inventor of Arduino introduced him to a community of artist-engineers, and learning the Processing programming language there opened his path into creative coding. In 2021 he released Spectron on Art Blocks, his first generative work, built from a video-synthesizer script driven by random seed parameters. A limited edition of 400 pieces, it procedurally generates a unique abstract video for each buyer at the moment of minting, developed from De Mai's research into the electronic schematics of 1960s and 70s analog video synthesizers, which their inventors had published under an early open source license. The work draws particular inspiration from the EMS Spectre, a 1974 instrument combining analog and digital signal logic that was used by the pseudonymous video artist Hayao Yamaneko, a persona of the filmmaker Chris Marker, in the film Sans Soleil.
