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 developed a practice centered on writing software to generate images. This approach connects his work to traditions of conceptual and systems-based art while reflecting something specific to computation: its capacity to produce variation, repetition, and emergence over time. For Reas, software functions as a primary medium and a way of making processes visible.

The work takes form in software, print, drawing, video, and installation. While each series has its own focus, certain themes recur, 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. His work engages systems that unfold across time and media, allowing images to generate, transform, and dissolve.

Reas’ major projects develop these ideas in connected ways. MicroImage (2001) and Process (2004) show how simple rules and simulated behaviors can generate complex drawings. 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 transforms botanical material into synthetic images, and Compressed Cinema reworks feature-length films into compact, shifting audiovisual fields. Together, these projects extend Reas’ practice of writing software through decisions about source material, model training, selection, and sequencing.

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) brings generative systems into Reas’ collaboration with The National, shaping moving images in response to music and performance. 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.

Across these projects, Reas explores how images are structured, how they emerge from systems, and how they circulate across media.