A large, flat-topped apparatus the size of a fus-ball game catches my eye first. It’s a spring afternoon in Midtown Manhattan and I’ve just entered John F. Simon Jr’s light-filled studio. "It’s my new CO2 laser." Simon explained. "You’ve got to see it in operation."

The soft-spoken artist quickly calls up an Illustrator sketch on a nearby computer, positions it for outputting, and places a piece of yellow acrylic on the machine’s glass-covered bed. A whirr--three parts photo copier, one part dental drill--follows and an intricate pattern is cut into the acrylic. He duplicates the process for an interlocking, red companion piece, rendering a remarkably complex, jig-saw puzzle configuration. It evokes the irregular course of the Mississippi in Simon’s native Louisiana. "The laser is what I used to make the acrylic pieces in the exhibition [at Sandra Gering Gallery in April.] Only a computer could have done it," he observes proudly, a far cry from Walter Benjamin’s classic lament about the loss of an artwork’s aura in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Simon, 38, is one of today’s best cyber artists although he might be more accurately termed a software artist. (It’s easy to forget that video and installation artists like Nam June Paik have used computers in their art for nearly two decades.) He gained widespread public attention in 1999 with a series of works comprised of wall-mounted LCD screens from Mac laptops that ran original code he’d written. In these works, the screen may be subdivided into areas of mutating color, labyrinths plotting the accumulation of time or persistent memory, or analytical representations of problems raised in the Pedagogical Sketchbooks of early 20th century artist Paul Klee.

The description may sound stiff, but that’s the problem with translating visual experience into prose: Simon’s works are both ravishingly beautiful and intellectually engaging. As San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director David Ross aptly observed, "John has taken a bottom-up approach to the construction of digital art...The idea of code-based art works has been utterly transformed by Simon's elegant formal sensibility and his very dry humor."

Two years ago Simon’s career caught fire. He’s been seen in two important group shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art (the Biennial in 2000 and BitStreams this year), three solo exhibitions at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York, and in drawing shows at the prestigious Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, CT. What’s more, foundations like Creative Capital are lending support, and his works are often sold—frequently to museums--before they’re shown. He’s also currently negotiating the contractual ins-and-outs of a large commission for a Midwestern university. But if success seems to have come quickly, his preparation for it did not.

Portrait of the Digital Artist as a Young Man

Simon’s career calling seems inevitable. As a teenage, Simon shot Super 8 home movies and abstract photographs of patterns in nature. After studying geology and art at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design, he moved onto graduate school at Washington University, where he learned computer programming for the school’s planetary science program. At Brown, Simon worked on mapping NASA’s Viking Orbiter photos of Mars at Brown and then re-contextualized the same images for his appropriation-based photo-projects for RISD. Several things, however, led to his rejection of planetary science: the Space Shuttle disaster, the SDI-driven militarization of federally-subsided science research and the development of personal computing.

"I couldn’t see myself working on Star Wars," he says. "They wanted to know how my studies of the atmosphere of Mars could be used for laser penetration of our atmosphere." In 1987, he enrolled in the School of Visual Arts’ MFA computer art program; it was the only one of its kind at the time and the new generation of Mac IIs and IBMs offered real, image-processing possibilities via connected scanners. The only student in the program who could write code, he wrote up a storm and soon discovered that PhotoShop had incorporated many of the image-manipulating innovations for which he’d written programs. He even published a commercial package with SVA instructor Tim Binkley in 1991 called Symmetry Studio for designing with repeated patterns, but it never took off..

Unlike so many, narrowly-focused, 22-year-old cyber-artists Simon was already well-versed in art history by time he got to graduate school. (He’d spent a summer prowling the museums of Europe and had taken many courses is contemporary, classical and Renaissance art history.) When he received his MFA, he was, drawn, not surprisingly, to scientifically minded color theorists such as Bauhaus educators Josef Albers and Johannes Itten. Later his reading turned to philosophy--from non-Cartesians à la Goethe to current Chaos Theorists such as F. David Peat and James P. Crutchefield. But Paul Klee influenced him most. "He was very analytical, but also personal; you can always recognize a Klee drawing," Simon observed. "His annotated sketchbooks about diagramming natural processes from seed germination to picture production freed me up to be scientific or analytical." Such reading helped him resolve the conflict he felt between the creativity of writing original code and the struggle with age-old problems inherent to drawing and painting.

Simon’s daily routine now includes both reading and sketching. He likes writing software to explore and activate the images he sketches. Some he sketches to observe the process of drawing itself, which he incorporates into his code. Other drawings explore form and color. Writing code offers him the opportunity to watch those images change and gives him a chance to play. He can change the program as it runs and it can also change itself. There are modification-producing processes built into the system, as well: Simon’s images are programmed to incorporate data from the system’s clock, Internet sites, or a random number generator. As Simon pointed out in a recent interview (with himself) for a self-published booklet about his work: "The generative nature of software leaves the image open-ended; an image may appear with an entirely new structure and function...There is no fast forward--each image may depend on the results from the previous image."

Pixel Perfect

Before embarking on his current object-software works, Simon was one of the first artists producing for the World Wide Web. He characteristically describes his attraction to the Web as "a viewing platform for software ideas." To visualize the process of visiting a site, he created AlterStats (1994), which changes due to being visited. If a visitor requested a new page on the site, AlterStats yielded a diagrammatic picture incorporating the new request and the history of those preceding it. Or in today’s parlance, he created a dynamic database.

Thanks to the cross-platform wizardry of Java scripting, Simon then went on an even more conceptual and compelling project, Every Icon (1996). The work displays every icon on the Web on a 32 x 32 size pixel grid. At the rate of 100 icons whizzing by each second, it would take billions of years to complete--that is, entirely darken--the grid flashing on your desktop. It’s an eloquent demonstration of exponential growth.

Two years later, Simon left the realm of the entirely conceptual. It was a move prompted by aesthetic considerations, (Also he’d made next to no money from his software "multiples.") Simon exhibited in a drawing show that included a sparsely striking Sol LeWitt wall drawing and realized the importance of the installation and of extending a system to itscapacity. "I’d reached my conceptual limit," he shrugs. "I started searching for ways to get software involved, but not to make prints."

It’s a trajectory familiar from LeWitt and many other conceptualists of the seventies, including Joseph Beuys, Joseph Kosuth and Yoko Ono. When their work dematerialized into text, or documentation, or other non-commercial forms, many commentators of the day actually wondered if the art object as we know it might disappear. This tendency certainly resembles a less-pronounced version of the ‘90s embrace of online art and digital video by visual artists. But as the millennium turned, many of them have either shifted their practice from the still-bandwidth-hungry web back to the creation of gallery-sited mixed media or video-installation work. Some have even turned to conventional formats like painting and photography to express their digitally-inspired visions.

Simon began by putting Every Icon on computer screens. (He acquires Mac laptops primarily through eBay.) But his seminal work of reinvention was Clock Piece (1998). Its wall-mounted LED screen showcases three, frequently-changing elements: An Every Icon-like "accumulator" representing long-term duration or persistent memory akin to a computer hard-drive; an in-motion, metronomic line ticking off the seconds; and a Christmas-tree like image of pendular motion inspired by an annotated Klee drawing demonstrating the motion of a conductor’s baton. Obviously, this has nothing to do with appropriating a specific image by Klee. It is an homage to Klee’s inquiry and is likely to make viewers want to know more. In fact, much of today’s most effective art retains the conceptualist legacy of demanding that the viewer seriously engage with it.

Clock Piece signaled that Simon had hit his mature stride, except that the work is entirely black on a green screen--a little like a Palm Pilot. Color--and lots of it--quickly arrived in the form of the eye-popping works for his CPU show at the Sandra Gering Gallery in 1999. These works’ elegantly antic, constantly moving patterns and swaths of saturated color were riveting. And the permutations proved conceptually rigorous.

ComplexCity, his show at the gallery last year, demonstrated Simon’s new confidence. The work is an abstract evocation of the chaotic Manhattan neighborhood near Penn Station where you’ll find Simon’s studio. He’s produced visually throbbing street scenes in aerial view and vistas of buildings on the horizon as figure- and ground elements in the collage-like, built environment reminiscent of midtown.