REAS

CAESURAS

Caesuras is an identity that has circulated online since 2017 through fragments released anonymously under the handle @csrsnt. The name began as an error, an autocorrect glitch that transformed “caseyreas” into “caesuras.” The mistake persisted and gradually became something more than a pseudonym. Caesuras is a parallel identity, a way of separating the work from the expectations attached to a known name.

A caesura is a break in the flow of a poem or a pause within a musical phrase. The name suggests interruption, but over time Caesuras has become continuous—a sustained body of work concerned with rhythm, repetition, interference, and instability. The images have a close relationship to sound without representing it. Color and form accumulate across the surface through repetition and variation, producing fields that are experienced less as compositions than as events.

The work has developed through two primary groups. AAI (Anarchic Artificial Intelligence) is built through recursive structures: grids divide and subdivide, producing increasingly unstable relationships between order and disruption. RIE (Ringing in My Ear) begins with sine waves and phase relationships, translating interference and resonance into shifting visual fields. Their structures are different, but both begin with minimal computational systems and explore the complexity that emerges through their repetition, interaction, and transformation.

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 base. 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 use recursion to produce dense, proliferating structures.

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)

RIE begins with sine waves and the changes that occur as waves move in and out of phase. These shifts create interference patterns, producing visual rhythms, moiré effects, and forms that suggest resonance. The full title, Ringing in My Ear, recalls tinnitus, the perception of a persistent tone in the absence of external sound. Rather than representing tinnitus directly, RIE uses the sine wave as a starting point for exploring interference, repetition, and drift. Each work develops as a field rather than a conventional composition, with patterns emerging through the interaction of waves.

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

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 produced through their aggregation. Small differences in phase accumulate across the image, creating patterns that continually move between alignment and interference. The work develops through these shifting relationships rather than toward a fixed resolution.

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, drift, and repeat until something unexpected appears.

AAI followed recursion until it multiplied into a dense constellation of textures, each a branch discovered rather than designed. RIE follows oscillation, attending to the patterns that emerge as waves move against one another. 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 conventional compositions or pictures made whole, but fields structured through repetition, variation, and accumulation. At times they remain crystalline and ordered; at others they become dense enough to approach noise. Each image records one state within a larger computational process.

The works of Caesuras were first released in 2021 into the Hic et Nunc (HEN) community, 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.

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