Simon De Mais
Europe
Spectron #228. Instance of generative art, NFT, 2021

Simon De Mai is an interdisciplinary artist and designer. In his artistic research, a rigorous design methodology is combined with an hands-on experimental approach, leading to unexpected processes and visual results where intuition, human error and technology imperfections play a fundamental role. Interested in the formal qualities of the final work as much as in exploring the creative possibilities of the technology behind it, his practice often results in developing custom tools or purposefully misusing existing ones. Lately, he presented a generative series inspired by his research on early video synthesizers.

A piece from a generative series inspired by video art from the 60s and 70s, especially early analog video synthesizers, and in particular the EMS Spectre, an instrument from 1974 that combined analog signals with digital logic. It was notably used by Hayao Yamaneko (a pseudonym for Chris Marker) in his masterpiece film Sans Soleil. Although created with modern technologies, Spectron shares the procedural logic with its analog ancestors.