REAS

ULTRACONCENTRATED

Ultraconcentrated (2012–2018) examines what happens when images are pushed to the edge of legibility—when clarity gives way to density, and when pieces of visual information accumulate until they interfere with one another. The works do not focus on single subjects or narratives, but on conditions where media, ideology, and representation are compressed into unstable fields. Familiar elements—a face, a headline, a fleeting signal from a broadcast—may surface briefly before dissolving back into noise. As such, the works in Ultraconcentrated approach pixels as signals under strain to reveal what occurs when visual information is multiplied, compressed, or concentrated beyond recognition.

As a body of work, Ultraconcentrated unfolds across several interrelated series: Signal to Noise (2012), Today’s Ideology / Linear Perspective (2015), AYFABTU (2015), Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles (2013), and Chronograph (2011). While each explores media collage differently, they all share the same premise: to test how images are perceived when they are splintered, sequenced, and layered. Through each work, the emphasis shifts from what an image represents to how it is experienced. For the viewer, this means attending to fluctuation, interference, and accumulation as conditions where meaning is partial, unstable, and contingent on one’s own process of looking.

Signal to Noise

The Signal to Noise series (2012–2015) transforms raw broadcast television signals into generative collages of sound and image. Works such as Signal to Noise (Software 1), KNBC (November 2015), and Americans! (2013) were sourced from the 602-608 MHz spread of the electromagnetic spectrum in Los Angeles, captured through an antenna, and archived in the studio. Instead of replaying the broadcasts, Reas’ work distills and amplifies the recordings into continuous audiovisual streams that foreground the technical transmission itself, rather than the programming it once carried.

Installation view of signal to noise (software 1) at dam projects. berlin, germany. 2012.

Installation view of KNBC AT day for night. houston, tx. 2017.

The resulting works are stroboscopic and stochastic. Layers of image and sound accumulate in real time to produce dense fields where legibility is always at risk. At moments, a phrase or figure surfaces; at others, the screen dissolves into patterns of interference. Their rhythm is uneven—sometimes pulled into shape by the cadence of speech, and sometimes breaking apart into static and color—suspending the viewer between states of recognition and disintegration.

Overall, the experience is less about following a sequence of events, and more about entering a visual space shaped by saturation and distortion. What emerges is an acute awareness of television as a medium: not a stable channel for information, but rather a fragile system of signals. Distilled to their raw transmissions and amplified through generative processes, these works redirect attention to the thresholds of perception, where meaning is provisional, unstable, and continually slipping into noise.

VIDEO excerpt from kttv (August 2015) SOFTWARE. 2015.

Installation view of control room in ultraconcentrated at bitforms GALLERY. new york, ny. 2013.

Today’s Ideology / Linear Perspective

Two related series starting in 2015—Today’s Ideology and Linear Perspective—draw their material from The New York Times. Both address the newspaper’s role as a daily arbiter of visibility that shapes not only what is deemed important, but also how we are instructed to think about it.

Today’s Ideology is composed of continuous generative collages created from all the editorial photographs in a single day’s issue. The images are shuffled and rendered obliquely, one after another, until they accumulate into dense surfaces. Each work is titled by its date, which anchors it to the specific day’s paper. By treating all photographs equally, the series erases the editorial hierarchy that usually distinguishes front-page images from minor illustrations. In this way, the weight of any single picture is diminished, replaced by a field where interpretation depends on the viewer’s active exploration.

Stills from TOday’s Ideology (19 July 2015), 2015.
Installation view of linear perspective at charlie james gallery. los angeles, ca. 2015.

Linear Perspective uses the primary editorial image of each day’s paper. These images are among the most charged and influential photographs in contemporary media—as front-page news, they frame collective awareness, and shape how society sees itself. In each work, the image radiates outward from a single point, expanding across a horizontal field from abstraction into legibility. As it traverses the wall, it shifts from unreadable texture into a recognizable picture.

Together, the two series question the authority of news images. Both are influenced by the art-historical invention of linear perspective, which once promised objectivity through mathematical space. But here, perspective is destabilized. In Today’s Ideology, all images are leveled into equivalence; in Linear Perspective, front-page photographs drift between recognition and abstraction. In both, meaning is unsettled, and the viewer must do the work of interpretation within systems that resist objectivity and undermine established hierarchies of representation.

AYFABTU

The 2015 AYFABTU (All Your Face Are Belong to Us) works explore identity within networked culture. Across three editions—Followers, Patrons, and Friends—faces are compressed into aggregates where individuality dissolves into mass.

Stills from AYFBTU (Followers 1k, 2k, and 3K), 2015.
In AYFABTU (Followers), profile images from accounts that follow the @REAS Twitter account were collected and processed to scale and align each face’s eyes. The accumulated faces belong to close friends, acquaintances, and strangers alike—with everyone connected only through the tenuous bond of following the same account. The result is a growing field of overlapping eyes, mouths, and noses—a self-portrait constructed not from the artist’s own image, but from the crowd of relations surrounding him. AYFABTU (Patrons) was created through a Kickstarter commission, layering photographs submitted by supporters into aggregate portraits. AYFABTU (Friends) harvested profile pictures from Reas’ Facebook network as its source.

VIDEO excerpt from followers (1k) SOFTWARE. 2015.

Together, the trilogy transforms private and public networks into dense collages of compressed identity. Its title, All Your Face Are Belong to Us, reworks the early internet meme All Your Base Are Belong to Us, redirecting its humor toward the mass circulation of portraits across digital platforms. For the viewer, the effect is one of saturation: an excess of faces at once, where the possibility of meeting a single gaze is replaced by a surface of multiplied recognition. Intimacy gives way to accumulation, and the individual dissolves into a collective image.

Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles

Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles (2013) was commissioned for the Textile Room in MOCA’s A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California exhibition. The work takes its title from Reyner Banham’s 1972 BBC film Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, in which the critic interprets the city from behind the wheel, framing the freeway as its essential vantage point. Reas’ project extends this idea into the digital era, drawing on Hollywood films in which Los Angeles itself functions as a protagonist.

Installation view of Casey Reas Loves Los ANgeles at moca. los angeles, ca. 2013. Collaboration with P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S and North Sails.
The source material for Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles consists of cinematic views of the city: driving sequences on freeways and surface streets, sweeping aerial shots from helicopters, and other images where Los Angeles is defined by motion and perspective. In recomposing this material, the work also resonates with Thom Andersen’s documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which catalogued the city’s many on-screen appearances as a way to argue that cinema is among the most powerful ways the city has been represented and understood.

Documentation from casey reas loves los angeles at moca. Los angeles, ca. 2013. collaboration with P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S and North Sails.

The footage for Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles was processed through custom software into dense collages, then mapped onto a structure designed by the Los Angeles architecture studio Patterns, which was coated with carbon fiber textile. Rather than presenting the city through its infrastructure or architecture, the work confronts the viewer with Los Angeles as a saturated media field: shifting, unstable, and already mediated through film. In this way, it reframes the city not as a fixed image, but as an environment experienced through accumulation, repetition, and overload, where recognition continually gives way to density.

Chronograph

Chronograph (2011) was created in collaboration with Tal Rosner as a site-specific software mural for the Frank Gehry–designed New World Symphony in Miami Beach. Since January 2011, the work has been projected nightly on the building’s 7,000-square-foot exterior wall, transforming the architecture into a continuously shifting canvas.

The source material for Chronograph is rooted in both place and time. Thousands of photographs taken during the construction of the New World Symphony building, along with images of the surrounding art deco neighborhood, form the visual archive. These materials are recomposed by custom software into sequences that shift between recognition and abstraction, animating the building’s surface in ever-changing patterns.

oVerview of chronograph at new world symphony. miami, fl. 2011.

The work is punctuated by videographic events that occur at the top of each hour. During these moments, aspects of the mural’s choreography—pacing, palette, rhythm, and geometry—are altered, creating a new cycle of emphasis. Over the course of an evening, the wall passes through countless permutations which, while never repeating, are always tethered to its architectural and photographic sources.

Chronograph is both monumental and ephemeral: a software mural bound to a specific site yet endlessly variable, compressing time, architecture, and local history into a field of generative abstraction that is as unstable as it is immersive.

Early Experiments

The roots of Ultraconcentrated lie in three early works—Cinema Image (2000), Mediation (2002), and ORA (2003)—each of which dismantles photographs and reconstitutes them as data signals.

Among these early experiments, Cinema Image was the first and most pivotal work. In it, a still image is decomposed pixel by pixel, then reassembled into a temporal sequence with each unit of color becoming a frame shown at 24 per second. In this way, the photograph flickers into a stream of shifting fields, its structure revealed only through time. Aligned with the tradition of flicker films, the work transforms representation into a flood of color, anticipating the later emphasis on images as unstable fields of excess.

Stills from mediation, 2002.
The later work Mediation reduces photographs into vertical bands of color, obscuring symbolic content and replacing it with animated chromatic surfaces. Its four modes—Politics, Fashion, Death, and Sex—collapse distinct subject matter into shifting signals.

ORA makes explicit the digital image as data, presenting nine photographs through four simultaneous readings of their color values. The work highlights how images exist as numbers before they appear as pictures, and it later served as the software sketch for ATOMS (2023).

Together, these experiments displace the photograph from representation toward signal, compression, and overload. They mark the moment when images in Reas’ practice began to operate less as windows onto subjects than as dense, unstable fields—ultimately laying the foundation for everything that followed in Ultraconcentrated.

Thresholds

Each series within Ultraconcentrated begins from a different kind of source—broadcast television, daily newspapers, social media networks, or Hollywood films—yet all are subjected to the same pressure. They are concentrated to the point that they lose their editorial framing, and until the distinctions between signal and noise, friend and stranger, and figure and ground collapse.

What results are not singular compositions, but conditions of experience: screens thick with interference, collages of news stripped of hierarchy, networks of faces blurred into masses, time compressed into dense surfaces. These are images calibrated to exceed clarity.

Ultraconcentrated is not about extracting meaning from media, but about staging the moment when media becomes too saturated to parse. It treats this condition not as failure, but as another way of knowing—one that asks viewers to engage actively with what is present, rather than to merely consume what is given.

Related Artworks
Browse the Ultraconcentrated category on the REAS INDEX.

Further Exploration
Andersen, Thom. Los Angeles Plays Itself. Directed by Thom Andersen. Los Angeles, 2003. Film.

Banham, Reyner. Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Directed by Julian Cooper. BBC, 1972. Film.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Lavin, Maud. Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

Manovich, Lev. “What Is Digital Cinema?” In The Language of New Media, 172–192. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001.

Spielmann, Yvonne. Video: The Reflexive Medium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Translated by Julie Rose. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Selected Exhibition History
Cut from the Same Cloth. Palo Alto Art Center. Palo Alto, CA. 18 January – 6 April 2025. Curated by Christine Duval. Today’s Ideology (5 November 2024), METASOTO. [E-25-01]

Art Must Be Artificial. Diriyah Art Futures. Diriyah, Saudi Arabia. 26 November 2024 – 15 February 2025. Curated by Jérôme Neutres. Today’s Ideology (26 July 2015). [E-24-08]

Tech/Know/Future: From Slang to Structure. George Segal Gallery, Montclair State University. Montclair, NJ. 14 September – 11 December 2021. Curated by Tom Lieser. KTTV (August 2015). [E-21-03]

Crooked Data: (Mis)Information in Contemporary Art. University of Richmond, Joel and Lila Harnett Museum of Art. Richmond, VA. 9 February – 5 May 2017. Curated by N. Elizabeth Schlatter. KTTV (August 2015). [E-17-04]

Engaging Technology II: Art + Science. David Owsley Museum of Art. Muncie, IN. 28 September – 22 December 2017. Curated by John Fillwalk. Tox Screen, Process 15, MicroImage (Software 1). [E-17-10]

CODE and NOISE. El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. Santa Fe, NM. 10 – 26 June 2016. Curated by Christine Duval. Today’s Ideology (26 July 2015). Exhibition subsequently presented at Arena 1 in Santa Monica, CA. 10 September – 8 October 2016. [E-16-06]

Test Patterns. Current Museum. New York, NY. 4 November – 15 December 2016. Curated by Kelly Rae Aldridge. KTTV (August 2015). [E-16-09]

Festival Forte. Montemor-o-Velho Castle. Montemor-o-Velho, Portugal. 25 – 27 August 2016. KNBC (December 2015). [E-16-07]

Istanbul Light Festival. Zorlu Center. Istanbul, Turkey. 13 – 19 November 2015. Curated by Adam Eeuwens and Rebeca Méndez. Linear Perspective, Today’s Ideology. [E-15-06]

Day for Night. Silver Street Studios. Houston, TX. 19 – 20 December 2015. Curated by Alex Czetwertynski. Debut of KNBC (December 2015). [E-15-09]

Linear Perspective. Charlie James Gallery. Los Angeles, CA. 5 September – 17 October 2015. Debut of Today’s Ideology, KTTV (August 2015), AYFABTU, Linear Perspective. [S-17]

Tox Screen. Chronus Art Center (CAC). Shanghai, China. 6 September – 4 October 2015. Tox Screen. [S-18]

Yes No. Pasadena City College. Pasadena, CA. 23 January – 29 March 2014. Debut of Tox Screen. [S-16]

Casey Reas Loves Los Angeles. A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California. Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). Los Angeles, CA. 16 June – 16 September 2013. Textile Room commission. [C-11]

Ultraconcentrated. bitforms gallery. New York, NY. 5 September – 12 October 2013. Debut of Ultraconcentrated, Americans!, Control Room prints. [S-15]

Chronograph. New World Symphony. Miami Beach, FL. Permanent projection since January 2011. Site-specific software mural created with Tal Rosner. [C-04]