John F Simon Jr. is a multimedia artist and software art pioneer who work and installations are found in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others. In 2011, he collaborated with Icelandic singer Bjork to write an app for her album, Biophilia. Simon's newest publication, Drawing Your Own Path: 33 Practices at the Crossroads of Art and Meditation, is out now by Parallax Press. Simon grew up in central Louisiana and currently lives and works in Sugar Loaf, New York.

Topics Discussed in this Episode:

• Creative ruts leading to personal creative breakthroughs
• His experiences going to Brown and SVA
• How he started to experiment with digital imaging
• Communal VR and AR spaces
• "Snowcrash", a book by Neal Stephenson
• Classic panopticons
• His research into AI
• The "no-self" experience
• Discussing the idea behind his book "Drawing Your Own Path"
• Understanding and dissecting meditation
• "Secret of the Golden Flower" (book)
• Mindfulness being executed when the verbal and non-verbal parts of the brain sync up
• The personal narrative
• Bruce Lee
• Creating your own reality

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