Every Icon

Every Icon by John F. Simon, Jr.

John F. Simon, Jr. Every Icon (1997)

Artist Biography

John F. Simon, Jr. has been producing art professionally for almost 20 years beginning with hand and pen plotter drawings and progressing through Internet Art to finally arrive at his own practice of 'coding as creative writing'. The main way that he shows his Software Art is through sculptural wall hangings with LCD screens that he calls 'art appliances' and has made and sold since 1999. He also make drawings and paintings daily in the 'traditional' media of gouache and pencil.

Color Panel v1.0, his first 'art appliance' was published as an edition of 12 and shown at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York in 1999. It was acquired at that time by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shortly after, his premier piece of Internet based Software Art, called 'Every Icon', was included in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. John's work was shown again at the Whitney Museum in 2001 in their survey of computer-based work 'BitStreams'. This show included large-scale versions of earlier software works now titled Color Panel v1.5 and CPU v1.5.

JFS, Jr. has shown new work with the Sandra Gering Gallery regularly for 14 years (it recently expanded and is now the Gering & Lopez Gallery). He had had his 7th solo show there in the Fall of 2007. His work has international exposure including large surveys like Media City Seoul 2002 (Seoul, Korea) and Flower Power at the Musee des Beaus-Arts in Lille, France. And most recently he will have a solo show in Galeria Javier Lopez, 2008 ( Madrid, Spain) and a retrospective with a catalog at Collezione Maramotti, 2009, (Bologna, Italy).

John has received numerous commissions in varied media. 'Unfolding Object'(2001) was commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum. In 2002 the Business Committee for the Arts commissioned him to design and produce a limited edition print. He fabricated the edition out of laser cut acrylic. It was titled 'Closed Circuit' and is now in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. By far his largest commission and work is 'Channels', a 116-foot long permanent installation for the University of Iowa College of Medicine completed in 2002. This piece incorporates laser cut Formica and six large monitors with custom Software Art.

Other highpoints and awards include the Trustees Award for an Emerging Artist that I received from The Aldrich Museum for Contemporary Art in 2000 and his 1999 Creative Capital New Media Grant. An edition of laser-cut plastic-acrylic drawings, Two Rivers, was published by The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in 2005 and in 2006 his artist book and software, "Mobility Agents" was published by The Whitney Museum of American Art and Printed Matter Bookstore in New York.

John F. Simon, Jr. continues to produce new software panel artworks each year and is lucky enough to have them acquired by museums. In addition to those stated previously, his Software Art Appliances can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Ulrich Museum of Art, The Tweed Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery among many others.

Formal Analysis

John’s piece, Every Icon, is a permutational form structured by a 32x32 grid that systematically turns each pixel, or unit, on or off (black or white). It is essentially a binary structure that will eventually work out every possible combination of black and white units within the confines of the 32x32 grid. Undoubtedly over time recognizable shapes and images would momentarily exist, however, we won’t live to even see the second line completed within our lifetime.

Concept

Simon's concept that he was pursuing, was to measure all possible outcomes that the icon could produce within the grid, as he states “In contrast to presenting a single image as an intentional sign, Every Icon presents all possibilities.” [1] John F. Simon, Jr's interest distinctively in programming progressive accumulation, goes further than the computer and Internet with time and experience.

Influence

John F. Simon, Jr. has been noted for pulling inspiration from past artists and applying some of their own principles to his new media projects - bringing in a sort of art history background to his technologically-based artworks. Sandra Gering mentioned John as having taken influence from artists such as Klee. His display of enumeration can be paralleled to greats such as Sol LeWitt for their relentless cataloguing and encyclopedic-use and storage of numbers and shapes.

Fun Facts

• 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.

• You can purchase your own personalized applet of Every Icon for $20

Wiki Authors

• Natalie Amoore
• Ariel Kaplen
• Brock Newman
• Liz Villalva

Every Icon, January 14, 1997. Online Artwork, John F. Simon, Jr.