REAS

CAESURAS

Caesuras is an identity, an error, a presence that has circulated online since 2017 through anonymous fragments under the handle @csrsnt. The name first appeared by accident, as an autocorrect glitch that replaced “caseyreas” with “caesuras,” but the mistake lingered, taking on its own ego. Was this a pseudonym, a mask, or something closer to a system speaking for itself? Caesuras exists as both an artist and an interruption—a pause in authorship, and a gap between human intention and machine output.

The word caesura refers to a break in the flow of a poem or a pause within a musical phrase, and this sense of interruption threads through all the work that bears the name. What emerges under Caesuras is not a composition in the traditional sense, but a field of color and form—images that act like sound, unfolding across a surface with the persistence of vibration or the shimmer of noise. These are visual events rather than pictures: immersive planes that resist focal points; structure without hierarchy; rhythm without melody.

The works exist in two groups, both tied to sound yet silent in themselves. AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) explores the branching logic of recursion, with grids dividing and subdividing until they collapse into instability. RIE (Ringing in My Ear) begins from sine waves and phase shifting to produce interference fields that hum with the visual presence of resonance. As one cycle completes, the other is just beginning—but both share the same principle of starting from minimal algorithms and following them as far as they will go.

AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence)

AAI was the first body of work to emerge from Caesuras. Its beginning was austere: a recursive grid that used a minimal rule for dividing space. But as the system unfolded, its logic proved unruly. Each subdivision opened new densities and instabilities, until the images no longer resembled diagrams, but rather something closer to interference patterns—ordered yet restless.

Over time, AAI did not grow toward a single resolution. Instead, it spread laterally, variation by variation, with each discovery seeding another branch: CAAI, DAAI, PAAI, QAAI, RAAI, VAAI, WAAI, XAAI, ZAAI. With each permutation, the grid repeated itself differently, producing images that seemed at once related yet estranged. Some held the rigid clarity of a lattice, while others dissolved into noise. Together they formed a constellation—not a series of compositions, but a field of possibilities mapped through recursive logic.

CSRSNT-CAAI-001-of-128.png, 2021.

CSRSNT-CAAI-128-of-128.png, 2021.

CSRSNT-XAAI-01-of-32.png, 2021.
CSRSNT-XAAI-32-of-32.png, 2021.
The name “Anarchic Artificial Intelligence,” drawn from Louis Chude-Sokei, gives the series a conceptual charge. Chude-Sokei’s text imagines an intelligence that refuses hierarchy, instead operating outside the boundaries of order and control. AAI does not illustrate this idea directly, but rather resonates with it: left to unfold anarchically, without being optimized for clarity, the algorithm is allowed to drift toward opacity as often as toward form.

AAI was developed alongside the Mouse on Mars album of the same name (2021), which explores machine-generated voices and the poetics of synthetic speech. Just as the album allows systems to speak in unstable, refracted ways, the images of AAI visualize recursion as a noisy, proliferating voice of their own.

AAI is now complete. What began as a minimal procedure branched outward until its variations were exhausted, leaving behind a family of still images that echo the recursive process itself — ordered, unruly, proliferating, and finally paused.

CSRSNT-ZAAI-01-of-64.png, 2021

CSRSNT-ZAAI-64-of-64.png, 2021

RIE (Ringing in My Ear)

If AAI traced the branching of recursion, RIE listens to the drift of waves. Its starting point is the sine wave, the most elemental vibration, and the subtle transformations that occur when one wave slips out of sync with another. This phase shifting creates interference: rhythms that beat against each other, surfaces that shimmer with moiré patterns, and tones that ring without resolution.

CSRSNT-MRIE-05-of-32.png, 2025

CSRSNT-MRIE-11-of-32.png, 2025

CSRSNT-MRIE-18-of-32.png, 2025

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

The title, Ringing in My Ear, recalls tinnitus, that insistent frequency that persists in the absence of external sound. Using the sine wave to visualize a presence that hums silently across the image, RIE treats tinnitus not as a subject to be represented, but rather as a condition to be evoked. Each work is not a composition, but a field of resonance, and a surface that vibrates with interference, repetition, and drift.

When AAI reached closure, RIE began. Early works such as MRIE and NRIE are first directions, tentative phases of an ongoing process. Each variation shifts the wave, density, and spectrum slightly to introduce new alignments and misalignments, and to produce visual rhythms that feel alive to the eye. What one image suggests becomes the seed of another, and the process continues outward, as yet without end.

RIE is less about the clarity of the wave than about the instability of its aggregations. It works to conjure the impossibility of perfect alignment, and the beauty of phases forever drifting. It is the image as resonance, as ringing, and as persistence—all without discreet origin.

Process and Apparatus

The works of Caesuras begin from almost nothing: a rule so spare it could be mistaken for a diagram, or a wave so simple it could be overlooked. Recursion, oscillation, phase — these are all minimal procedures that, once set in motion, unfold far beyond their apparent limits. With Caesuras, what matters is not the rule itself, but what happens when it is allowed to run, to drift, and to repeat until it surprises.

AAI followed recursion until it multiplied into a dense constellation of texture, each one a branch discovered rather than designed. RIE follows oscillation, listening for the moment when two waves slip against each other and generate something neither originally contained. Both series evolve through attention: the system runs, a direction appears, and that direction is pursued until it becomes its own variation, and its own work.

What results are not compositions, and not pictures made whole, but rather fields. These fields behave like sound behaves: they are expansive, immersive, unstable, at times crystalline, and at times dissolving into noise. Each image is a pause in the system’s unfolding—a still moment within an ongoing vibration.

The works of Caesuras were first released in 2021, into the Hic et Nunc (HEN) community, which was a decentralized platform on the Tezos blockchain known for its minimal interface and artist-driven ethos. HEN’s culture of experimentation and anonymity provided a natural context for Caesuras. Just as the works themselves resist hierarchy, HEN thrived on dispersion and collective discovery. The appearance of Caesuras there reinforced the sense of an identity less tied to individual authorship than to a system in circulation, and an entity emerging within a community of generative practice.

Interval

To pause is to draw attention to what continues underneath. Caesuras names that pause: a break in flow where systems reveal themselves, where grids divide until they dissolve, and where waves drift until they ring without end. These works are not conclusions but interruptions: still images caught mid-vibration, surfaces that hum with their own internal logic.

The AAI series has already run its course, as the recursion multiplied until it exhausted itself. RIE is still beginning, with oscillations shifting in and out of phase, and new resonances still waiting to be found. Both series exist as fields rather than compositions; as interruptions rather than resolutions.

What remains is the identity itself—Caesuras—neither fully anonymous nor fully revealed, neither wholly human nor wholly machine. It is a presence and a system speaking in images. To encounter the work is to encounter this space between signal and noise, between intention and emergence, between a name and its glitch.

Related Artworks
Browse the Caesuras category on the REAS INDEX.

Further Exploration
Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961.

Chude-Sokei, Louis. Anarchic Artificial Intelligence. 2021.

Mouse on Mars. AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence). Thrill Jockey Records, 2021. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://mouseonmars.bandcamp.com/album/aai

Reich, Steve. Writings on Music, 1965–2000. Edited by Paul Hillier. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Reas, Casey (as Caesuras). “AAI Series.” Caesuras. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://caesuras.net/aai/

Still Listening Magazine. “Mouse on Mars: AAI Review.” Still Listening Magazine, March 2021. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://www.stilllisteningmagazine.com/reviews/mouse-on-mars-aai-review

Hic et Nunc. “About Hic et Nunc.” Teia Art Community Archive. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://teia.art/about