Questioning the infinite possibilities opened by using machines in image production, the software art pioneer John F. Simon Jr. (USA, 1963) developed the first version of Every Icon, programming a device that generates images. Through software deemed extremely minimal from a technical point of view, the artist set out to capture all the possible sign compositions in a grid of 32x32 pixels. The images generated by the informatic code are then mirrored by a stream of electrons that, despite changing at the rate of one hundred variations per second, would take “several hundred trillion years” to produce the first image recognizable to the human eye.
John F. Simon Jr.