He became widely known in the admittedly small world of online-software art through his Webwork, "Alter Stats — Condition of the Web Observer" (1995), which provided the site visitor with a real-time, statistical profile of those accessing the site, including that visitor him- or herself. Simon's interest in the issues intrinsic to programming differentiates him from many artists creating image- or narrative-driven cyber-art. Will new media art be limited and shaped by the commercial software usually used to created it? Or by the conventional Web site and interface formats that predominate among artworks online? Simon also investigates these conceptual concerns offline in drawings and plug-in objects incorporating computer LCD screens and processors. By creating art in varied media, he is beginning to reach wider audiences — and to provide insights into the expansive possibilities of computer-art interactions and the issues they raise.

Robert Atkins: I've heard that you make your digital-art students learn computer programming. Is that true?

John F. Simon, Jr: Yes. When I was teaching in the Computer Art MFA program at the School of Visual Arts [in New York] I taught both programming and systems. The systems class was meant to explain how the computer worked, layer by layer, from "why the user interface looks like a desktop" to "how electricity and transistors can be made to store and manipulate information." I don't think we should allow creative innovators to use application software without showing them how it is all put together.

RA: Why not?

JFS: So many choices that influence the final product are made by the designers of the software package. I first saw computers when their potential was much more broadly considered. Before the ubiquitous Photoshop and Director programs it was possible to imagine all kinds of creative uses for computers. I like to open that door for students, if just for a glimpse of other possibilities.

RA: Do you think software conceived in Silicon Valley is as American a medium as Hollywood films? Is it having that kind of influence on global culture?

JFS: That's a good question and a very complicated one. Electronics are clearly having a profound effect on global culture. But is the computer an American product? Is the telephone? If we think of software writing in general as a reflection of American influence then, yes, because software is now being written everywhere. America defined the PC market and spread the PC worldwide so the world is now using the American concept of a PC. It's the same with operating systems. I don't see many interfaces for PCs which don't use the Windows/Mac Desktop metaphor even though I can imagine far better interfaces.

As far as applications and styles of software published by American companies, I see a lot of coding from Europe that has a distinctly non-American flavor. The attitude is generally more aggressive and less accepting of the limitations of commercial software. Think of projects like Nato, a software for multiple-video-imaging processing and IOD's Webstalker, an alternative to Web browsers like Internet Explorer. Despite that, I'm still not sure that the best way to think about the expanding cultural influence of the electronic — think of the boom of home computing in China — is to differentiate what might be its American elements. I think that the division between those who use electronics and those who don't — the so-called digital divide — is more far reaching than any geo-political boundary.

RA: So AOL Time Warner isn't the next Disney?

JFS: Perhaps a different Disney. I don't think AOL Time Warner intends to build any theme parks. But AOL has been very smart about figuring out what works online and Disney hasn't. American culture is likely to dominate markets for online entertainment, but that's got less to do with being electronic and more to do with the American domination of global pop culture in general.

RA: What effect is the electronic having on artists?

JFS: One can't argue with the explosive demonstration of creativity online. It's as if there were an untapped urge for self-expression that the arrival of html and the Web seemed to fulfill. More people are doing artistic and creative things for public consumption than ever.

Just remember ten years ago when getting things together — say, color images of your work — for someone was such a hassle. Now it's so easy to snap a digital photo and either e-mail it or ink-jet a print without ever leaving your work space. This capacity to make and share still and moving images has got to have a positive effect on image making, even if it takes a while to sort out the good stuff from the mass of mediocrity.

RA: Some of us refer to a particular sort of this mediocre art as looking "Photoshopped," meaning it all looks the same because it was produced with software intended for designers. Might art be devolving into design?

JFS: That's a big — and general — question. Let me begin by making a few observations: There are identifiable styles and artifacts that relate to the design and limits of software tools. But now the traditional tools are getting mixed with digital tools of production, blurring the lines of origin. Let's face it, art is art. Fashion and taste change all the time, and artists' and critics' interests change all the time. I believe artists who work from a strong personal vision will make interesting art with Photoshop or anything else they find necessary to realize their ideas. That said, using a software tool by just following the demos and the menus is going to produce very similar results.

RA: Did you come to art from computing or vice versa?

JFS: It was more a gradual synthesis of the two. I was in Providence at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design getting undergraduate degrees in Geology and Studio Art. This was the first half of the eighties before the PC was readily available or very powerful. In fact, the first Mac came out in January, 1984.

RA: Much of your work relates to drawing. Was that always your primary interest?

JFS: Actually my initial interest was photography. In high school I had a darkroom and in college I did photography and photo-silkscreening. I found connections between the mechanical processes of photography and computer image processing. Drawing didn't become the focus of my work until 1989.

RA: What was your earliest computer artwork like?

JFS: My earliest computer artwork involved image and photo manipulation. I did a lot of digitizing with a video camera and a lot of scanning with cheap early Mac scanners. As an undergraduate I used the digital images from NASA's Viking Orbiter spacecraft for prints. In graduate school for Planetary Science at Washington University in St. Louis. I started writing lots of code and manipulating digitized images directly. I worked out systems to overlay and combine images according to sets of rules. As a graduate student in art in New York at the end of the eighties, I spent more time developing my coding skills and making more intricate digital image combinations.

There was already a kind of euphoria developing from the pre-World Wide Web Internet bulletin board systems and MOOs. [A MOO is a subset of the MUDs, Multi-User Domains (or Dimensions or Dungeons), virtual spaces in which visitors can converse, build and navigate.] Suddenly it was like, "Hey, we can all talk to each other!"

RA: Were you interested in these onscreen dialogues?

JFS: Yes. At the beginning. The whole thing was a novelty, of course. The first time you try chat you're hooked for at least awhile. How can you not think: "Who are these people?"

Those on The Thing [an early BBS system] and on the PMC-MOO [hosted by the journal Post-Modern Culture] were artists and academics. I was very interested in finding an intellectual community that wasn't there in graduate school. So it was a great thing, less as an art practice than as a community and information source. It's easy to forget how difficult it is to find out what people are thinking and to meet other artists with similar interests.

RA: Were you writing software at this time?

JFS: Yes. I published a commercial package with Tim Binkley in 1991 called Symmetry Studio. It was software for designing with repeated patterns. But it used to be much more difficult to distribute software than it is now. You had to deal with a distributor or publisher and everything had to be platform specific, for Macintosh or PC. Symmetry Studio was for Mac only; there were very few small, cross-platform packages in those days. It was published by Van Norstrand Reinhold as a manual/book and disk and sold through book stores. I think it sold 700-1000 copies at around $70 each, but I only got the smallest amount of money from it and no royalties. Most of the money went to the publisher, I'm sure.

RA: Many foundation funders act as if artists can really make money on software. Are there many instances of this actually occurring?

	Color Balance

JFS: Not that I'm aware of. I just read in Talk magazine that the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and [its director] David Ross are interested in creating a software company to make authoring tools and help fund the museum. That's not as easy as it sounds. Marketing is often the most important factor in the commercial success of software. I'd hate to see the museum's focus waver from supporting art to supporting marketing of an entirely new product. And there's a greater danger: Whoever writes a software package has control over what kinds of things the software can produce, as we've discussed. Should the museum take on the role of deciding how artists should work? Will artworks that have the look of SFMOMA's authoring tool be more readily accepted for exhibition there? It's very complicated.

To return to your question, frankly I don't know anybody who makes a living creating art that is entirely software. Two of my works that fall into that category are Every Icon and Color Balance. I've sold 85 copies of Every Icon for $20 each and several copies of Color Balance for $500, but that's hardly enough to stay alive.

RA: What appealed to you about the Web when browsers came along in 1993-94?

	AlterStats

JFS: The Web to me appeared to be a viewing platform for software ideas. The first thing I wanted to do was visualize this process of looking at Web pages — that is, viewing a site. So I made AlterStats. It's a self-modifying World Wide Web self-visualization, meaning that it is an activated image that changes from being looked at. If a page was requested, AlterStats rendered a picture that showed the new request and the history of previous requests. The new request was then added to the database and included in all the future pictures it made. By building new images every time it is looked at it was a completely dynamic site. Also, it had shades of the uncertainty principle — that you couldn't look at it without changing it. It seemed to me to be really a "network" object because it depended on the setup of the Web to exist.

Another Webwork, Every Icon, was an old concept that found a new home online. Icons are the little pictures on a computer desktop (the folder, the trash can, the AOL symbol), and they are all displayed in a 32 X 32 size pixel grid. Instead of me having to design new desktop icons, I wrote Every Icon to display every possible combination of squares on the 32 X 32 grid and automatically show me every one on the Web. It was a little slower than I'd expected: To show the number of possibilities in the first 2 lines (64 squares) would take billions of years at the rate of 100 icons whizzing by per second. It's clear that there are many, many, many more images in the world than we will ever be able to see in our lifetimes, even if we looked at hundreds of images a second.

Java, which came along in 1996, is perfect for conceptual pieces like this because the code runs, more or less, on all platforms. I could write about this idea of exponential growth, which needs to be experienced over time, and use the Web to distribute it so that people could see it in action.

RA: You just returned from Berlin's Transmediale Festival where you judged the artists' software or social software competition. What was that like?

JFS: Transmediale is a media art festival. They have competitions and showings of film and video as well as music and software.

The category I judged was called "Artistic Software" which will be changed to "Software Art." Transmediale's Artistic Director, Andreas Broeckman, created this software category to recognize the artistic merits of software as a medium in itself. Software has long played a secondary role to "interactive installation" in media festivals. We hoped to look at software as a kind of creative writing, a writing that might be evaluated both for doing what it set out to do and as a means of expression in and of itself.

RA: What are you working on now?

JFS: Many things. I am encapsulating software on wall-mounted LCD screens. I take the screen and the processor from mostly used laptop computers, which I get from eBay or dealers. I am currently using Apple G3 Powerbooks with 14.1" screens. I remove the case and mount the LCD screen to a plastic housing of my own design. The CPU is mounted on the back of the housing. I install my own software, which runs automatically when the computer is turned on. The images on the screen are constantly changing.

This is a way to write software directly for a processor and not have it compete for attention with other things on your desktop. I sell these works through the Sandra Gering Gallery, with which I've had a longtime association.

I'm also using a computer controlled laser to cut and engrave materials like acrylic. I am interested in how the lines and shapes from my algorithmic tools can be manifest in material form.

RA: What will you show at "Bitstreams," the Whitney Museum's upcoming digital show?

JFS: For "Bitstreams" I will have two large gas-plasma screens displaying new versions of the software I wrote for my first two LCD panel pieces. Color Panel v1.0 will be rewritten and called Color Panel v1.5, and CPU will be CPU 1.5. There are some fun issues when moving the software from it's small LCD display to gas plasma-screen size. How does one handle the increases in wall size, color depth and computing speed? Do you just proportionally increase the resolution — that is "res-up" — so things are bigger and blockier on the screen? Or do you leave things at the same size and make more of them?

RA: Conceptually, it seems like a reflection on a culture that craves bigger and more all the time.

JFS: Absolutely.