REAS

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DETAIL OF PROCESS 13 from PRocess compendium, 2010.

DETAIL OF Technical Image #1, 2024. Collaboration with Erika Weitz.

DETAIL of A Mathematical Theory of Communication book, 2018.

Still from ATOMS, 2023.

Detail of CSRSNT-MRIE-24-of-32.png, 2025.

DEtail of Untitled film still 4.10, 2019/2023.

Still from DAY i Die video for the national, 2017.

REAS STUDIO DOCUMENTATION BOX, 2013.

detail of HSB-119-006-090-1366-618 / HSB-135-006-090-1232-687, 2015.

Still from METAJUDD, 2025.

Microimage A-06, 2002.

DETAIL OF PROCESS 5 from PRocess compendium, 2010.

DETAIL OF Process 6 (image 4), 2005.

Still from Study for a Garden of Earthly Delights, No. 4, 2018.

Since the early 2000s, Casey Reas has built a practice around writing software to generate images. While this approach links him to earlier traditions of conceptual and systems-based art, it also reflects something specific to computation: its ability to produce variation, repetition, and emergence over time. For Reas, software isn’t just a tool for creating images — it is the medium itself, and a way of making processes visible.

This approach has produced a wide range of works in software, print, drawing, video, and installation. While each series has its own focus, certain themes reoccur, such as the tension between structure and instability, the translation of data into visual form, and the shifting conditions of perception in a computational culture. Overall, his works are less about singular images than about systems unfolding across time and media to create conditions in which images appear, transform, and dissolve.

Reas’ major projects develop these ideas in distinct but connected ways. MicroImage (2001) and Process (2004) show how simple computational rules can give rise to complexity, translating concepts from artificial life like simulated neurons into systems for drawing. Atomism looks at the construction of digital images by breaking them down into their smallest units—pixels and signals—and recombining them into new states. Ultraconcentrated (2012) transforms existing media from television broadcasts, newspapers, and social networks by compressing and layering them until legibility gives way to indecipherable density.

In Silico (2018) and Compressed Cinema (2020) extend Reas’ explorations into machine learning, using generative adversarial networks to create new forms of collage: In Silico reimagines botanical matter as synthetic images as visual mutation, and Compressed Cinema reworks feature-length films into compact, shifting audiovisual fields. Together, these projects mark a shift from writing code line by line to working with emerging algorithmic instruments whose behavior must be guided, shaped, and curated.

Other series pursue related questions through dialogue with art and culture. CENTURY (2012) reimagines the strategies of twentieth-century abstraction within generative software, extending its structural concerns in composition and color into the logic of computation. Videos for Music (2017) investigates how generative systems can shape the moving image in collaboration with sound, expanding the reach of software-based processes into popular culture. Caesuras (2021) operates as an alter ego, an anonymous identity through which Reas develops works that center on fields of color and noise in relation to experimental sound.

Together, Reas’ work reflects an ongoing exploration into how images are structured, how they emerge from systems, and how they circulate across media. Each exploration shows that computational art opens new ways of thinking about images—how they are generated, how they signify, and how they can be experienced. Reas’ work makes these dynamics visible, positioning software as both material and method in the ongoing redefinition of visual culture.