John F. Simon: Mobility Agents

Here’s a new project that links modernism and conceptual art to computationally generated art. John F. Simon’s Mobility Agents: A Computational Sketchbook is now available. Simon’s web page is an extensive resource as a whole, but I like the looks of this particular project. Mobility Agents is a software drawing tool that is sold as book and CD set. The CD is described as an electronic book with a functioning drawing program that explores the nature of drawing and the possibility of translating the notion of drawing across media.

Both Simon himself and the press release very self-consciously place Mobility Agents within a clear art historical ontology, which is unsurprising given that the book is co-published by the Whitney Museum. That being said, however, it is always nice to see a project that acknowledges and awareness of art historical precedent and that develops in response to traditional representational practices. Simon is interested in the ways in which specific modernist artists (Klee, Kandinsky, Miro) seem to anticipate time-based media. While I am always somewhat suspicious of such predictive rhetorics, I particularly enjoy that Simon uses the work of Paul Klee as a jumping-off point. He explains, “”I’m always inspired by reading Paul Klee’s notebooks because his drawings look like diagrams of moving objects and unseen forces begging to be activated … I owe a tremendous debt to the teaching and thinking of Paul Klee. His diagrammatic style and conception of the line as a result of motion was the blueprint for many of my investigations into dynamic imaging.”” Mobility Agents as a whole is inspired by Klee’s artwork and notebooks, and also relates to the instruction-based conceptual practice of Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt.