John F. Simon Jr
Traffic Boogie Woogie, time-based NFT, 2021
John F. Simon, Jr. is a visual artist, author, and Software Art pioneer. His digital artwork "Every Icon" was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and his Software Art appliances are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in NYC, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and many others. In 2011, Simon collaborated with Icelandic singer Björk to write an app for her album, Biophilia, the first app album ever created. Simon's 2016 book, “Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation," explains how his daily drawing practice revealed the overlaps between programming the machine and programming the mind.
Simon’s custom software program creates emergent patterns of vehicular traffic with rules for stop lights, lane changes, and collision avoidance. Inspired by Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie painting (1942-43) and concept of “dynamic rhythm”.
