REAS

CENTURY

If the aesthetics of the twentieth century were shaped by the grid, modular form, and optical vibration, the twenty-first is shaped by information networks and computational media. As a body of work, CENTURY is Casey Reas’ sustained engagement with the legacy of modernist abstraction, reimagined through generative software. Earlier works tested the grammar of computation itself—how systems might be written as instructions, and how forms emerge from minimal rules. With CENTURY, the focus turns outward, toward dialogue with historical predecessors.

The works in CENTURY are not homage in any simple sense, nor are they pastiche. Instead, they ask what becomes of the structural ideas of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Max Bill when recast through code-based systems that are mutable, distributed, and capable of infinite recombination. Grounded in research yet insistent on the present condition of digital image-making, CENTURY frames abstraction as a living system: not a static canvas, but a process of motion, variation, and proliferation. At stake is the tension between modernism’s pursuit of clarity and rational order, and the generative multiplicities of software.

First presented in 2012 with Network C and Network D, alongside Signal to Noise, CENTURY has since expanded into a constellation of related projects: the eponymous CENTURY software, the METACENTURY homages, the exploratory sketches of CENTURY-XXX, the speculative horizon of CENTURY 2052, and the ongoing Networks. Together, these works extend ideas first articulated in painting, sculpture, and kinetic art into the logic of generative systems, showing how modernist strategies of seriality, permutation, and chance can be reinterpreted in code.

CENTURY (2021)

The central, eponymous work of CENTURY is a generative system shaped equally by Ellsworth Kelly and George Rickey. From Kelly, Reas draws on the artist’s Paris collages of the 1950s, in which painted sheets of paper were cut and recombined into unexpected arrangements that delicately balance order with chaos. These experiments in fragmentation and recomposition anticipated the shaped canvases and chromatic clarity of Kelly’s later career. In CENTURY, this procedure becomes software-based: digital surfaces are divided, shuffled, and perpetually reorganized.

Stills from CENTURY, 2021.
From Rickey comes the dimension of motion and, more crucially, the embrace of chance. Rickey’s kinetic sculptures, composed of delicately balanced arms, are known for responding to the slightest air currents by swaying in ways that, while unpredictable, always remain within the logic of their construction. In this way, these sculptures are rigorous systems designed to yield to contingency—and CENTURY translates this sensibility into code. Its compositions are never fixed; each iteration of the software produces a fresh recombination, a new cut through the field, as the algorithm opens itself to stochastic variation.

This capacity for perpetual chance-driven variation reflects the core of Reas’ practice. Just as Kelly’s collages demonstrate that a single form can unfold into countless arrangements, CENTURY ensures that no single state is definitive. Each rendering is one among innumerable permutations, a temporary resolution within an endless system. By joining Kelly’s material logic of recombination with Rickey’s kinetic openness to chance, CENTURY crystallizes the ethos of the project: the translation of twentieth-century abstraction into the generative language of software.

video excerpt from CENTURY #25 software, 2021.

METACENTURY

The works gathered under the title METACENTURY began as homages to modernist artists whose practices resonate with generative systems. Each piece is less a reproduction than a continuation, intended to carry forward the conceptual core of its source into the computational present.

METASOTO (2022) responds to Jesús Rafael Soto’s Bois-tiges de fer (1964), a sculpture of vibration and optical instability where pattern and line merge in three-dimensional space. Reas’ software translation shifts these ideas into the immaterial field of the screen. Lines move and overlap in changing densities, evoking both Soto’s kinetic openness and the flickering pulse of digital streams.

Stills from METASOTO, 2022.
Hommage à Molnár (2023), presented first in the Machine Imaginaire exhibition at DAM Projects, dives into the pioneering work of Vera Molnár. Using Molnár’s work in the Spalter Digital collection as reference, Reas designed a software “instrument” that generates endless variations within her precise visual grammar of the 1960s. The homage lies not in imitation, but in reenacting her balance of rule and exception, through which strict systems open themselves to chance.

METAVASARELY (2023) reimagines Victor Vasarely’s unrealized proposal for LACMA’s Art & Technology program (1967–1971). While Vasarely envisioned a machine of lights arranged in a grid that would be capable of producing millions of permutations, the project was deemed too costly by partner IBM. Reas’ reimagined version both fulfills and extends Vasarely’s vision. The software incorporates Vasarely’s “plastic alphabet” of forms and colors, which unfold as a flexible generative system.

STILLS from metavasarely, 2023.
Taken together, the METACENTURY works clarify the project’s stakes: to test how the structural ambitions of twentieth-century abstraction—instability, rule, permutation—can persist and transform within the language of software.

CENTURY-XXX

CENTURY-XXX is an ongoing series of software sketches that, while informal in execution, are conceptually continuous with the METACENTURY works. The sketches extend the logic of iconic modernist practices by translating paintings and objects into generative form. The series takes inspiration from Jean Tinguely’s Méta-Malevich (1954), a kinetic reimagining of a Kazimir Malevich work that reframed oil-on-canvas painting as a system open to motion.

Stills from CENTURY-XXX-METAJUDD, 2025.
Series 1 (2021–2022) engages artists including Malevich, Vera and François Molnár, François Morellet, Bridget Riley, and Ellsworth Kelly. Together, the sketches map a cross-section of twentieth-century abstraction, restaged through code. However, rather than replicating each artist’s signature, they operate as generative conversations to show how the principles of Suprematism, systematic chance, Op art, and cut-form abstraction might unfold computationally.

Series 2 (2022–2025) extends the dialogue to artists Herbert Franke, Verena Loewensberg, Max Bill, Donald Judd, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. As the works in Series 2 are smaller in size and more concentrated in focus than those of Series 1, they reflect an intensified engagement with each artist’s legacy.

Stills from CENTURY-XXX-METALOEWENSBERG, 2025.
Taken together, the two series demonstrate CENTURY’s capacity to treat modernism not as a closed canon, but as a living archive: a set of procedures and possibilities that can be sampled, reinterpreted, and reconfigured through generative practice.

CENTURY 2052

While other strands of CENTURY reimagine the twentieth century from a computational vantage point, CENTURY 2052 looks ahead, speculating on the lifespan of an artwork. Here, time is not simply a variable of animation or sequence, but mortality itself. Reas described the work this way when it was created in 2022:

This artwork will “die” on 20 October 2052.

Today I’m 50. Will I live to be 80? Will I outlive this artwork? Will this artwork outlive me?

The original CENTURY project is autobiographical. Creating art and experiencing art is the core of my life, and CENTURY is my homage to twentieth-century artists. It’s a synthesis of their ideas.

CENTURY 2052 brings the endeavor to the twenty-first century. It was released as 50 unique artworks, one for each year since I was born. The artwork transitions from life to death at 6:44pm EST on October 20th 2052.

STILLS FROM CENTURY 2052, 2022.
Released as fifty unique editions—one for each year since the artist’s birth—the piece ties its existence to a fixed horizon: it will transform in a way that will be revealed October 20, 2052. By linking the work’s death to his own projected lifespan, Reas fuses autobiographical time with technological time, collapsing the arc of a person with the programmed end of a system.

In doing so, CENTURY 2052 raises questions about what it means for art to persist in an era where digital media appears infinitely reproducible. Mortality here becomes a medium in itself: the countdown is part of the work. If the other CENTURY projects explore permutation and open-ended variation, this one insists on finitude. It is perhaps the most personal—and the most radical—gesture of the project, declaring that art, like life, is not inexhaustible.

Networks

If the twentieth century was dominated by the grid—the emblem of autonomy and order, as Rosalind Krauss described it—then the twenty-first is increasingly shaped by the network: relational, decentralized, and endlessly extensible. With this in mind, the Networks series has unfolded alongside the other CENTURY works to reframe the network, one of modernism’s central structures.

Stills from NETWORK C, 2012/2022.
Reas’ Networks draw on Paul Baran’s diagrams for distributed communication systems in the early internet. Conceived to model resilience against attack, Baran’s schematics imagined topologies without a single point of failure. Reas translates this logic into dynamic fields of color and motion, proposing the network not only as a technical structure but as a formal and cultural condition.

The works were inspired by the vibrancy of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942), where the grid is transformed by rhythm and light into a field of energy. In particular, Network C was created as a companion piece to Mondrian’s painted structure, translating it into the logic of data flows. If Mondrian’s canvas captured the pulse of New York’s streets in the 1940s, Network C visualizes the distributed architectures of the internet era—motion, color, and connection mapped into perpetual variation.

An Expanded Field

Across its strands, CENTURY stages a dialogue between generative systems and the legacies of twentieth-century abstraction. It translates Kelly’s seriality, Rickey’s kinetic openness, Vasarely and Molnár’s optical grammars, and the structural clarity of Judd, Loewensberg, and Bill into the medium of software. At the same time, it reopens a central question: how do artworks live in time?

Within Reas’ work, responses to this question unfold in different registers. CENTURY refuses fixity, its forms endlessly re-cut. METACENTURY and CENTURY-XXX proliferate through homage, extending modernist vocabularies into the computational present. The Networks reframe modernism’s grid as a distributed topology for a networked century. And CENTURY 2052, by contrast, anchors the project in finitude, confronting viewers with the programmed death of an artwork. Together, these trajectories mark the continuum between infinite generativity and inevitable ending.

By situating computational practice within this expanded field—bridging homage and invention, seriality and mortality—CENTURY demonstrates how digital art participates in and transforms the history of modernism. It acknowledges its debts while asserting its autonomy, using code not only as a medium but as a metaphor for art’s ongoing dialogue between past, present, and possible futures.

Related Artworks
Browse the CENTURY category on the REAS INDEX.

Further Exploration
Clarke, Jay A., Thomas Crow, Rachel Federman, and Cynthia Burlingham, eds. Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio. London: Modern Art Press, 2022.

Franke, Herbert W. Computer Graphics, Computer Art. Translated by Gustav Metzger. London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1971.

Haemmerli, Thomas, and Brigitte Ulmer, eds. Circle! Square! Progress!: Zurich’s Concrete Avant-garde. Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, Richard Paul Lohse and Their Times. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64.

Molnár, Vera. Untitled (Study for Inclinaisons). 1971. Felt-tip marker on paper. Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Archive. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://spalterdigital.com/artworks/untitled-study-for-inclinasions-2/.

Reas, Casey. “In Conversation with Casey Reas on CENTURY.” Art Blocks Journal, October 2022. Accessed August 20, 2025. https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-casey-reas-on-century.

Rickey, George. Constructivism: Origins and Evolution. New York: George Braziller, 1967.

Vasarely, Victor. Planetary Folklore. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Selected Exhibition History

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. Toledo Museum of Art. Toledo, OH. 12 July – 30 November 2025. Curated by Julia Kaganskiy. CENTURY. [E-25-04]

Electric Op. Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Buffalo, NY. 27 September 2024 – 27 January 2025. Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan. METASOTO. [E-24-07]

À La Recherche de Vera Molnár. Wolfgang Museum. Budapest, Hungary. 10 February – 14 April 2024. Hommage à Molnár. Exhibition subsequently presented at Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, 19 September – 26 January 2025. [E-24-01]

Machine Imaginaire | Vera Molnar. DAM Projects. Berlin, Germany. 28 January – 1 April 2023. Debut of Hommage à Molnár. [E-23-01]

Peer to Peer. Feral File. Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan. Debut of METASOTO. [E-22-07]

SonarMàtica. Sónar. Barcelona, Spain. 16 – 18 June 2022. CENTURY-XXX. [E-22-02]

The Digital. Miami Art Week. 3 – 5 December 2021. Curated by Sofia Garcia. CENTURY. [E-21-06]

Short Cuts. CentrePasquArt. Biel, Switzerland. 18 April – 6 June 2015. Curated by Daniel Sciboz. CENTURY. [E-15-04]

Zeitzünder. DAM Gallery. Frankfurt, Germany. 9 November 2013 – 1 February 2014. Network C. [E-13-17]

Run Computer Run: Examining Aesthetics. Rua Red. Dublin, Ireland. 24 May – 13 July 2013. Curated by Nora O’Murchú. Network D software and prints. [E-13-06]

CENTURY. Gallery [DAM] Berlin. Berlin, Germany. 29 September – 27 November 2012. Debut Network C, Signal to Noise (Software 1) and related prints. [S-14]