Simon De Mai

Artist

Simon De Mai · simondemai.xyz ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/simon-de-mai ↗

Practice

Generative art, creative coding, video synthesis, experimental image-making, and design

In the set

Spectron ↗ · 400 editions
Drifting ↗ · 360 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Simon De Mai’s practice begins with a productive contradiction. He is a computational artist drawn to technologies that resist the clean appearance commonly associated with computation. Instead of treating code as an instrument of perfect geometry, he uses it to retrieve flicker, interference, softness, distortion, and the elusive physical presence of electronic signals. An Art Blocks interview identifies him as an artist and designer whose research has encompassed cyanotypes, software anomalies, custom tools, and early video synthesizers. It also describes his interest in both systems and the formal character of their results.¹ That double attention is fundamental: De Mai does not merely imitate an obsolete visual style. He reconstructs behaviors through which a style can emerge.

The distinction matters because his images are not static exercises in retro design. They are events assembled from rules. Their lines bend, duplicate, and interfere; their colors appear transmitted rather than filled; their compositions hover between diagram and malfunction. De Mai has said that a generative element was already present in his earlier work, whether through human-produced data or random values supplied to a script.¹ In this account, generative art is less a sudden conversion than a clarification of a long-standing method. A system establishes the conditions, yet its visible outcome remains partially withheld until execution.

This dossier centers on two Art Blocks releases: Spectron, a Curated project comprising exactly 400 editions, and Drifting, a Playground project comprising exactly 360 editions. The former asks how software might inherit the procedural logic of analog video synthesis. The latter turns displacement itself into a compositional principle. Together they show an artist moving from the concentrated simulation of an electronic instrument toward a looser study of images whose identities emerge through motion, overlap, and instability.

Rebuilding the synthesizer as a rule system

Spectron is grounded in De Mai’s research into video art of the 1960s and 1970s, especially machines that generated shapes and patterns without external visual input. Sotheby’s catalogue note for Spectron #249 emphasizes this lineage and describes the work as sharing procedural logic with its analog predecessors despite being made with contemporary technology.² The project therefore operates through translation. Electrical voltages become programmable values, circuitry becomes code, and the live variability of a studio instrument becomes long-form generative output.

The historical reference is precise rather than decorative. An exhibition record describes Spectron as particularly informed by the EMS Spectre, a 1974 instrument combining analog signals with digital logic.³ That hybrid ancestry helps explain the project’s unusual visual register. Its outputs can look bodily and electronic at once: luminous bands compress into spines, oscillating contours suggest topographies, and fields of color seem to have passed through an imperfect transmission channel. The image is calculated, but it presents calculation as vibration.

De Mai’s own account positions Spectron as his first fully generative work. He began by asking whether random parameters could control his synthesizer, then developed a project in which variation was intrinsic to the instrument rather than applied after an image had been composed.¹ This is the conceptual core of the series. Each edition is not simply a different picture made with the same palette. It is evidence of a shared apparatus encountering a different state.

The project’s 400-edition structure makes difference legible at collection scale. An official Art Blocks token record exposes recurring attributes such as palette, orientation, bitwise operators, and frequency modulation, showing how individual outputs occupy positions within a designed parameter space.⁴ The collection record on OpenSea also reports a supply of 400 works.⁵ Yet taxonomy only partially explains the experience. The most compelling outputs exceed their trait labels because local incidents accumulate: a boundary shivers, a waveform folds back on itself, or two colors meet in a seam resembling light leaking through a damaged screen.

Live on Art Blocks: spectron-by-simon-de-mai ↗

Imperfection as material evidence

The apparent imperfections in Spectron are not failures to be corrected. They are signs that a system has material consequences. De Mai’s practice repeatedly returns to processes whose constraints become visible, from cyanotype chemistry to software anomalies and the characteristic distortions of video hardware.¹ Within Spectron, this interest produces a digital image that seems to remember cathode-ray displays, voltage-controlled oscillation, and unstable synchronization without pretending to be an archival artifact.

The series has entered the developing auction history of generative art. Sotheby’s included one Spectron output in its 2021 Natively Digital Art Blocks lot, a group of nineteen works representing projects from the platform’s early history.⁶ In 2024, the auction house separately offered Spectron #249, identifying it as an interactive animation and a unique iteration within a long-form series of 400.² A MutualArt record preserves the same work’s auction chronology and medium.⁷ These contexts position Spectron at an intersection of media archaeology, blockchain-native distribution, and market cataloguing.

The project has also circulated through online exhibition and moving-image contexts. Techspressionism’s NFT Now exhibition listed De Mai among the artists in a juried presentation of digitally mediated work.⁸ A Vimeo record for Spectron 0002, accompanied by music by Warner Jepson, preserves another presentation mode in which the series is experienced temporally rather than as a still.⁹ This temporal dimension is essential. Even when encountered through a captured frame, a Spectron output implies ongoing modulation. Its forms appear caught mid-transmission.

De Mai’s achievement is not the simulation of an old screen, but the construction of a contemporary system that can behave as though images remain electrically unsettled.

From modulation to drift

If Spectron concentrates attention on a virtual instrument, Drifting expands the question toward displacement. A market report’s chronology lists Drifting among generative collections associated with the first half of 2022.¹⁰ Its exact edition count is 360. Across that bounded field, drift functions not as incidental movement but as an organizing condition: forms slide from alignment, layers lose their stable correspondence, and the image develops through controlled separation.

The title carries both spatial and temporal implications. To drift is to move without arriving at a fixed destination, but also to accumulate difference gradually. This principle connects Drifting to De Mai’s broader fascination with systems whose outputs cannot be reduced to a single ideal state. Where conventional design often seeks a definitive arrangement, De Mai allows arrangement to remain provisional. Edges become traces of prior positions, repetition becomes a record of delay, and color behaves like information distributed across time.

The Art Blocks context is important because Playground provided a designation for further projects by artists already active on the platform. De Mai’s own link archive identifies Spectron as Curated and Drifting as Playground.¹¹ In this setting, Drifting reads as a conceptual continuation rather than a sequel. It retains Spectron’s concern with signal behavior while relaxing the earlier project’s direct association with a specific class of historical machine. The visual field becomes less like an instrument panel and more like an unstable landscape, one in which figure and ground exchange roles.

Live on Art Blocks: drifting-by-simon-de-mai ↗

A practice of productive translation

De Mai’s broader significance lies in how he translates between technical generations without collapsing their differences. Early video synthesis, creative coding, blockchain minting, and browser-based display each impose distinct conditions. His work does not claim that these media are interchangeable. It asks what can pass between them: procedural logic, susceptibility to noise, temporal variation, and an image’s capacity to appear alive.

That position distinguishes his practice from nostalgia. The analog past is not treated as a storehouse of effects. It becomes a methodological prompt. What happens when an image is generated rather than depicted? How can a bounded machine produce outcomes that feel excessive? Which irregularities persuade a viewer that a signal has encountered resistance? Spectron answers through frequency, logic, palette, and modulation. Drifting answers through displacement and the persistence of forms across altered positions.

Reception records demonstrate the range of frames through which the work has been understood. MutualArt associates De Mai with the 2022 exhibition Growing Out? Growing Up? Contemporary Art Collecting in the Baltics at Zuzeum Art Centre in Riga.¹² The exhibition Singularity, presented in Venice in 2022, included De Mai among more than 80 international artists contributing to an extensive presentation of NFT art.¹³ Collection databases continue to document Spectron’s supply and secondary-market history.¹⁴ None of these records alone defines the art, but together they show how De Mai’s images move among aesthetic, institutional, archival, and economic systems.

The strongest account remains the work itself: patterned yet unruly, historically conscious yet native to executable code. Across 400 editions of Spectron and 360 editions of Drifting, De Mai makes variation carry critical weight. Difference is not a decorative bonus added to a finished design. It is the subject and substance of the design, a demonstration that every image is one temporary settlement within a larger field of possibility.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Simon De Mai links page ↗.