Simon Rydén, also known as supermarket_sallad, is a multimedia artist from Malmö, Sweden. His artistic practice encompasses generative art, real-time animation, light, scenography, and sound.
Exploring the poetic within the technological, Rydén is fascinated by movement, our sense of time and space, and the textures of life. He creates immersive, slow-paced, and textured artworks. With a background in choreography, he delves into rudimentary movement and embodied interpretation within digital and immersive art.
The artist who inspired Rydén to step on the path of generative art was Merce Cunningham, a mid-century choreographer who incorporated chance in his works. As a way to understand generative practices in performing arts, Simon started dabbling with generative digital art, and has since fallen head-first down that rabbit hole.
As a dancer, he studied at The Royal Swedish Ballet School and the Juilliard School in New York. He performed works by choreographers like Roy Assaf, Aszure Barton, and Jiří Kylián among others. Often working interdisciplinarily, he has further studied interdisciplinary and generative practices in performing arts during his master's studies at Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola.
RICECARE, the multimedia performance with dance, baroque cello, and projections created in collaboration with the artist's brother, cellist Johannes Rydén, was selected as one of the finalists in the Goodmesh Concours in The Hague (Netherlands) in December 2022 and won the "Audience award".