REAS

ATOMISM

Atomism is a body of work spanning over two decades that explores methods for dismantling digital images into their smallest units, and recomposing them into new visual states. Taking its name from the ancient idea of Atomism—that matter is composed of indivisible particles—the series reimagines this way of thinking for the digital era, where every picture is reducible to pixels, and every sequence of numbers can be rendered as a field of color.

Rather than advancing metaphysical claims, the works in Atomism focus on perceptual and material experience: what happens when images are broken apart, scattered, and reassembled through code. Atomism is less a theory than a sustained practice that treats images as open systems which are always fragmenting, always reforming, and never fixed.

Across formats—plotter drawings, generative software installations, prints, and murals—Reas’ approach remains consistent. Images are reduced to discrete elements, recombined algorithmically, and presented as dynamic fields that hover between legibility and abstraction. From the earliest Still Life experiments to An Empty Room and A Mathematical Theory of Communication, the series stages a dialogue between the density of visual perception and the formal rigor of computational processes.

Still Life Software

The Still Life software works (2015–2023) transpose the still-life tradition in painting into a generative, computational register. Each of the ten works in the series generates a kinetic, geometric still life composed of one type of Platonic solid—the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, or icosahedron—realized in both RGB and HSB color systems. Long regarded as elemental structures of matter, these logical and essential forms link antiquity’s metaphysical geometry to the pragmatic origins of computer graphics, where they served as standard test objects for rendering.

Installation view of there’s no distance at bitforms GALLERY. new york, ny, 2016.

VIDEO excerpt from still life (Rgb A) software, 2016.

In the Still Life series, Platonic solids are not depicted as stable volumes, but rather decomposed into pixels, with each pixel’s values translated into lines of varying position and color. From these simple rules emerge visual fields that oscillate between structure and dissolution. As each work is designed to run continuously, images are never repeated, and the series unfolds as a system rather than as a set of fixed compositions.

There’s No Distance (2023) extends the Still Life series into blockchain-based generative art. In contrast to the color versions, this work is black and white, functioning as a software counterpart to Reas’ earliest Still Life woodblock prints. There’s No Distance reinterprets the same logic—solids reduced to atomic lines—while emphasizing contrast and form over chromatic fields. Released as a generative edition, There’s No Distance underscores how the Still Life system can adapt across contexts, from woodblock to software to networked distribution.

Stills from there’s no distance, 2023.

Still Life on Paper

The Still Life works started in 2015 with traditional print editions, as the first generative systems for the series were created to translate software into material form. The earliest pieces were made at Anderson Ranch, and included a woodblock diptych, HSB-119-006-090-1366-618 / HSB-135-006-090-1232-687, and the lithograph RGB-056-006-080-823-715. These works established the trajectory of Still Life, grounding its generative systems in the history of printmaking while marking the transition from digital processes into material inscription.

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

INSTALLATION VIEW OF RGB drawings in the Aesthetica EXHIBITION at dam PROJECTS in berlin, 2015.

The Still Life series expanded in 2020 with the RGB plotter drawings, the first produced for AESTHETICA – 50 Years of Computer Generated Art at DAM Projects in Berlin. Five works were created for this exhibition, including RGB-013-010-120-255-352 and RGB-052-010-120-557-610, now in private and museum collections. Each drawing was made with archival inks on paper, with their lines oriented by numeric angles corresponding to RGB channels. Subsequent plotter series continued the investigation: RGB-2 (2020, three works) and RGB-3 (2020, six works).

The most recent works in the series, produced in 2025, mark the most materially ambitious phase of Still Life. The EARTH–SIMULACRUM–RGB drawings use Sakura Pigma Micron inks on Strathmore Bristol—a paper that was developed in the nineteenth century for technical drawing and drafting in ink, thus linking the Still Life works to this earlier history of mechanical inscription. Its smooth surface allows for precision and durability over the long plotting runs required, while conceptually connecting the series to traditions of geometric draftsmanship. The EARTH–WIREFRAME–RGB series follows a similar format, while the smaller SIMULACRUM series introduces a fourth gray ink to the RGB palette. These works maintain the same underlying generative systems as the software works, but the slow, tactile accumulation of pen on paper emphasizes process and materiality in ways screens cannot.

Across woodblock, lithograph, and plotter drawings, the Still Life works present variations of the same core system refracted through media with centuries of history. Where the software unfolds in continuous variation, the drawings and prints fix singular outcomes. Each carries the trace of the code but insists on the physicality of paper, ink, and pressure—extending still life into a dialogue between computational systems and the long lineage of drawing by hand.

SIMULACRUM (A-P-04), 2025.

simulacrum (A-O-01), 2025.

An Empty Room and 923 Empty Rooms

An Empty Room (2023), commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982, advances the logic of Still Life by shifting from volumetric solids to flat geometry. Where Still Life explores the decomposition of three-dimensional Platonic forms, An Empty Room pares this down to circles, squares, and triangles. The move from simulated volume to planar primitives marks a deliberate turn inward, away from illusionistic depth and toward the fundamentals of computer graphics, where images are constructed from two-dimensional arrays.

Installation view of AN Empty Room at the los angeles county museum of art (LACMA), 2023.

Although it builds directly on the structure of the Still Life series, An Empty Room changes its material vocabulary. The underlying system is the same: an image is generated and then deconstructed into its constituent elements. But here the geometry is presented in regular grids of varying scales. Unlike the overlapping accumulations of Still Life, the forms remain isolated, with each occupying its own cell. The result is imagery that feels pared down and diagrammatic, trading density for precision and layering for separation.

923 Empty Rooms (2023) extends this logic toward systematic totality. Its title is literal: there are 923 possible permutations of six elemental shapes, and each “room” presents one. Exhibited with Bright Moments across six cities simultaneously—Tokyo, Berlin, London, New York, Mexico City, and Los Angeles—the project underscores the paradox of completion and experience. While the system is finite and exhaustive, no single viewer can encounter it in full.

923 EMPTY ROoms #3

923 EMPTY ROoms #196

923 EMPTY ROoms #438

923 EMPTY ROoms #494

923 EMPTY ROoms #762

923 EMPTY ROoms #868

Together, An Empty Room and 923 Empty Rooms pivot Atomism toward an elemental register. By stripping the concept back to the most basic 2D primitives, the works foreground how complexity can arise from even the simplest vocabulary. These works are austere, systematic, and inexhaustible—framing the generative field not as ornament but as structure in its most fundamental form.

A Mathematical Theory of Communication

Commissioned for the Gates-Dell Complex at the University of Texas at Austin, A Mathematical Theory of Communication (2014) translates the language of information theory into a visual field. Its title recalls Claude Shannon’s 1948 essay, which defined signal, noise, and entropy as the fundamental conditions of transmission. Where Shannon pursued efficiency, Reas renders instability and ambiguity as visual form.

The imagery grows out of Reas’ Signal to Noise (2012) and the Ultraconcentrated (2013) works, where broadcast signals were captured and recomposed in real time. In the Gates-Dell murals, the material is fixed yet restless, hovering between legibility and static. The work is not an illustration of Shannon’s theory but rather a poetic analogue: surfaces where transmission is always on the edge of collapse, and noise becomes generative rather than disruptive.

Installation view of A Mathematical Theory of Communication at the gates-dell complex at the university of texas at austin, 2014.

DETAILs of A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 2014.
Installed within a computer science building, the murals acknowledge that all digital systems are conditioned by uncertainty. Instead of suppressing error, they foreground it, positioning the viewer as a receiver of shifting messages that never fully resolve. In this way, A Mathematical Theory of Communication extends the logic of Atomism: images are fragmented into elemental signals and recombined into emergent structures, visualizing the conditions under which communication itself unfolds.

In 2018, the project was extended into book form and published with RRose Editions. The publication presents twelve unbound sheets that can be re-ordered into multiple sequences. As a companion to the murals, it translates the scale of architectural installation into intimate, tactile form. Both mural and book emphasize multiplicity, demonstrating how a single generative system can produce endless configurations across media and context.

detail of A Mathematical Theory of Communication book with rrose editions, 2018.

ATOMS

ATOMS functions as a fulcrum between earlier works like ORA (2003) and Cinema Image (2000), which expose the digital image as a sequence of numbers rather than a fixed picture. While ORA translates photographs into multiple simultaneous registers—color sequences, pixel streams, and signal-like traces—Cinema Image transforms a static picture into a flickering temporal sequence, revealing its structure in time rather than space.

With ATOMS, this exploration takes a decisive turn. Instead of beginning with an external photograph, the work generates its own source image algorithmically. That synthetic image then becomes material for three distinct translations, each exposing a different facet of its numerical ground. First, the pixels are unfolded into a linear stream of colors, a restless sequence that visualizes their order. Second, the red, green, and blue channels are disaggregated into parallel signals, oscillating like waveforms and exposing the hidden scaffolding of digital color. Third, the image is rendered as a height map and rotated in space, turning the surface into mass, and flatness into objecthood.

Stills from ATOMS, 2023.
The operations in ATOMS borrow the vocabulary of scientific visualization—graphs, signals, 3D models—yet resist their explanatory function. While the cube-like extrusion, vibrating color streams, and jittering lines resemble demonstrations, they clarify nothing. Instead, they insist on the plurality of ways an image can be parsed, reframed, and performed. ATOMS is less a tool of visualization than a meditation on the aesthetics of data itself. It marks a shift from the image deconstructions of ORA and Cinema Image toward the generative logics of Atomism, where images are no longer only dismantled but also synthesized anew.

Continuities and Convergences within Atomism

Over time, the Atomism works have unfolded as a meditation on how images can decompose and re-form under computational logics. Early experiments like Cinema Image (2000) and ORA (2003) asked what happens when photographs are stripped to their signals—when an image is treated not as representation, but as data. This impulse resonates with a longer history: Plato’s atomist metaphors in the Timaeus, early modern theories of indivisible particles, and the digital transformation that reduced every picture to pixels.

Later, the Still Life works extended this line by translating simulated forms into spatial constructions where each pixel’s RGB value determines line and placement. Their transformation into plotter drawings emphasized the continuity between computational procedures and centuries-old traditions of geometry and draftsmanship. Then, An Empty Room and 923 Empty Rooms distilled these concerns into an elemental lexicon of circle, triangle, and square, recalling midcentury permutation art while situating it within generative code.

Installation view of STILL LIFE (RBG A) in bitforms gallery la at row dtla, 2019.

Installation view of there’s no distance in poems in code at Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions. tokyo, japan, 2024.

In 2014, A Mathematical Theory of Communication brought another register into view. Drawing from Claude Shannon’s definition of signal, noise, and entropy, it recast information theory as a visual field: murals that oscillate between legibility and static; between communication and collapse. Here, Atomism engaged not only the structure of images but also the uncertainties of perception itself.

Across these projects, the “atom”—whether geometric unit, pixel, or signal fragment—emerges as the irreducible element of image-making. Yet the atom is never inert; it always recombines into motion, rhythm, and emergent form. The works hold that images are both whole and divisible, continuous and discrete, and constructed as much by systems and codes as by the eye.

In this way, Atomism functions as a bridge across Reas’ practice. It inherits the signal-based experiments of Ultraconcentrated and anticipates the latent-space investigations of In Silico. It brings geometry, photography, information theory, and machine learning into dialogue, showing how each epoch’s technologies reshape what counts as an image.

Atomism remains an open system. Like Plato’s solids repurposed for early computer graphics or Vasarely’s proposals foreshadowing generativity, this work situates itself in a lineage of artists and thinkers who used abstraction to probe visual experience. Its works may multiply, permute, and recombine endlessly, but they will always circle back to a single question: how do we represent the world, and how do these representations in turn affect how we understand ourselves?

Related Artworks
Browse the Atomism category on the REAS INDEX.

Further Exploration
Bright Moments. “923 Empty Rooms.” Accessed August 18, 2025. https://www.brightmoments.io/923emptyrooms.

Ferree, Joel. “Introducing METAVASARELY and An Empty Room, A Two-Part Digital Work by Casey Reas.” Unframed (blog), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, February 13, 2023. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://unframed.lacma.org/2023/02/13/introducing-metavasarely-and-empty-room-two-part-digital-work-casey-reas.

Khan, Nora N. “Casey Reas’ Disconcerting Software Paintings.” The Village Voice, November 13, 2007. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.villagevoice.com/casey-reass-disconcerting-software-paintings/.

Paul, Christiane. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Landmarks: The Public Art Program of The University of Texas at Austin. Accessed August 18, 2025. https://landmarks.utexas.edu/artwork/mathematical-theory-communication.

Reas, Casey. A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Los Angeles: RRose Editions, 2018.

Shannon, Claude. “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (1948): 379–423, 623–656.

Selected Exhibition History
Purely Platonic. DAM. Berlin, Germany. 19 June – 31 July 2025. Debut of new Still Life drawings. [S-30]

It Doesn’t Exist (In Any Other Form). bitforms. New York, NY. 9 November 2023 – 12 January 2024. Debut of the final four Still Life artworks and There’s No Distance. [S-27]

Interreality. Desmond Tower. Los Angeles, CA. 14 October – 25 November 2023. Still Life (HSB-D). [E-23-10]

SIGGRAPH Art Gallery. Los Angeles Convention Center. Los Angeles, CA. 8 – 10 August 2023. Installation of An Empty Room for the 50th anniversary of SIGGRAPH. [E-23-06]

923 Empty Rooms. Bright Moments. Tokyo, Japan; Berlin, Germany; London, UK; New York, NY; Mexico City, Mexico; Los Angeles, CA. 14 – 19 August 2023. Simultaneous one-week exhibition in six cities, opening in Tokyo and concluding in Los Angeles. Debut of 923 Empty Rooms. [S-24]

An Empty Room. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Los Angeles, CA. 9 April – 2 July 2023. Commissioned artwork installation for the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982. Debut of An Empty Room. [S-23]

Unit London Take-Over. Nassima Landau Art Foundation. Tel Aviv, Israel. 17 November – 22 December 2022. Still Life (HSB A). [E-22-06]

Stochastic Confabulation. California Polytechnic State University Art Gallery. San Luis Obispo, CA. 2 November – 1 December 2017. Still Life (RGB-AV A). [S-20]

There’s No Distance. bitforms gallery. New York, NY. 10 September – 16 October 2016. Debut of Still Life software. [S-19]

A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Gates-Dell Complex, University of Texas at Austin. Austin, TX. Commissioned murals by Landmarks. 2014. [C-14-01]