Every Icon #91

Every Icon #91 poses a deceivingly simple question—can a machine produce every possible image? Conceived by John F. Simon Jr. in 1997, during the formative years of Net art, the work forms a conceptual inquiry into programmed image generation. The original _Every Icon _is a 32-by-32 grid of black-and-white squares capable of producing every possible visual configuration. Written in Java, the program calculates 400 icons per second. Yet even at that rate, completing the task would take over 500 million years, making the project both mathematically exhaustive and temporally inconceivable. In this manner, the work poses a thought experiment at the extreme limits of computation.

In 2021, Simon reimagined Every Icon as an NFT written largely in Solidity and stored fully on the blockchain, collaborating with the engineering team Divergence to ensure its persistence within the blockchain ecosystem. This iteration introduced interactive features that allow users to generate new starting icons derived from classic Macintosh imagery by Susan Kare (seen in Every Icon #91), Boolean logic operations, and stochastic variation—turning collectors into active participants in the search for unseen images. Across all versions, Every Icon remains a meditation on combinatorial infinity, the evolution of digital media, and the poetic tension between algorithmic determinism and human perception. The artist has stated: “brute force computation will not solve the problem of deciding which images are beautiful and interesting. That job still belongs to humans.”