REAS

CENTURY

CENTURY is Casey Reas’ sustained engagement with the legacy of twentieth-century abstraction, reimagined through generative software. Earlier works tested the grammar of computation itself by asking how systems might be written as instructions and how forms emerge from minimal rules. With CENTURY, the focus turns outward, toward dialogue with historical predecessors. The works imagine what becomes of the structural ideas of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Max Bill when recast through software systems that can move, vary, and continually recombine. First presented in 2012 with Network C and Network D, alongside Signal to Noise, the project has since expanded through the eponymous CENTURY software, the METACENTURY homages, the sketches of CENTURY-XXX, CENTURY 2052, and the ongoing Networks.

CENTURY (2021)

The central, eponymous work of CENTURY is a generative system shaped equally by Ellsworth Kelly and George Rickey. From Kelly, Reas draws on the artist’s Paris collages of the 1950s, in which painted sheets of paper were cut and recombined into unexpected arrangements. These experiments in fragmentation and recomposition anticipated the shaped canvases and chromatic clarity of Kelly’s later career. In CENTURY, this procedure becomes software-based: digital surfaces are divided, shuffled, and continually reorganized.

Stills from CENTURY, 2021.
From Rickey comes the dimension of motion and the embrace of chance. Rickey’s kinetic sculptures, composed of delicately balanced arms, are known for responding to the slightest air currents by swaying in ways that, while unpredictable, always remain within the logic of their construction. CENTURY translates this balance between structure and chance into code. Its compositions are never fixed; each iteration of the software produces a fresh recombination within the visual system.

Kelly’s collages show how a single form can unfold into many arrangements; in CENTURY, no single state is definitive. Each rendering is a temporary resolution within an ongoing system. Joining Kelly’s recomposition with Rickey’s kinetic openness to chance, the work carries their approaches into generative software.

video excerpt from CENTURY #25 software, 2021.

METACENTURY

The works gathered under the title METACENTURY began as homages to modernist artists whose practices resonate with generative systems. Each piece is less a reproduction than a continuation, intended to carry forward the conceptual core of its source into the computational present.

METASOTO (2022) responds to Jesús Rafael Soto’s Bois-tiges de fer (1964), a sculpture of vibration and optical instability where pattern and line merge in three-dimensional space. In METASOTO, lines move and overlap in changing densities on the screen, extending Soto’s interest in optical instability through software.

Stills from METASOTO, 2022.
Hommage à Molnár (2023), presented first in the Machine Imaginaire exhibition at DAM Projects, engages the work of Vera Molnár. Using Molnár’s work in the Spalter Digital collection as reference, Reas designed a software “instrument” that generates variations within her precise visual grammar of the 1960s. The homage lies not in imitation, but in reenacting her balance of rule and exception, through which strict systems open themselves to chance.

METAVASARELY (2023) reimagines Victor Vasarely’s unrealized proposal for LACMA’s Art & Technology program (1967–1971). While Vasarely envisioned a machine of lights arranged in a grid that would be capable of producing millions of permutations, the project was deemed too costly by partner IBM. Reas’ reimagined version takes up and extends Vasarely’s proposal. The software incorporates Vasarely’s “plastic alphabet” of forms and colors, which unfold as a flexible generative system.

STILLS from metavasarely, 2023.
Together, the METACENTURY works test how instability, rule, and permutation from twentieth-century abstraction change when implemented in software.

CENTURY-XXX

CENTURY-XXX is an ongoing series of software sketches that run alongside the METACENTURY works. The sketches extend the logic of twentieth-century practices by translating paintings and objects into generative form. The series takes inspiration from Jean Tinguely’s Méta-Malevich (1954), a kinetic reimagining of a Kazimir Malevich work that reframed oil-on-canvas painting as a system open to motion.

The term “software sketch” describes a quicker, more informal process than that of Reas’ larger projects. While those works can take months or years to develop, these sketches are often made in a few days. Sketching with code is a way to think through ideas and discover directions for future work. The sketches are equally important within the practice, allowing experiments to develop at a different pace.

Stills from CENTURY-XXX-METAJUDD, 2025.
Series 1 (2021–2022) engages artists including Malevich, Vera and François Molnár, François Morellet, Bridget Riley, and Ellsworth Kelly. Rather than replicating each artist’s signature, the sketches test how particular structures and visual ideas might unfold computationally. Series 2 (2022–2025) extends the dialogue to artists Herbert Franke, Verena Loewensberg, Max Bill, Donald Judd, and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Together, the two series treat twentieth-century abstraction as material for continued experimentation, reinterpreting its structures and procedures through software.

The long-term aim is to create 100 software sketches, each inspired by a different artist and artwork from the twentieth century.

Stills from CENTURY-XXX-METALOEWENSBERG, 2025.

CENTURY 2052

While much of CENTURY looks toward the twentieth century, CENTURY 2052 looks ahead, speculating on the lifespan of an artwork. Here, time extends beyond animation or sequence to the programmed lifespan of the work. Reas described the work this way when it was created in 2022:

This artwork will “die” on 20 October 2052.

Today I’m 50. Will I live to be 80? Will I outlive this artwork? Will this artwork outlive me?

The original CENTURY project is autobiographical. Creating art and experiencing art is the core of my life, and CENTURY is my homage to twentieth-century artists. It’s a synthesis of their ideas.

CENTURY 2052 brings the endeavor to the twenty-first century. It was released as 50 unique artworks, one for each year since I was born. The artwork transitions from life to death at 6:44pm EST on October 20th 2052.

STILLS FROM CENTURY 2052, 2022.

What that transition will look like has not yet been revealed. Until then, the works continue to generate changing compositions, placing ongoing variation within a fixed span of time. The programmed date brings the duration of the software into relation with the life of its maker. The software can be given a precise moment of transition, while Reas’ questions about his own future remain unanswered. This uncertainty gives the autobiographical dimension of CENTURY another form, extending its engagement with the artists who shaped his life toward the question of how long that life, and the artwork, will continue.

Networks

If the grid was one of twentieth-century abstraction’s central structures, the network has become a defining structure of contemporary computational culture. The Networks series has unfolded alongside the other CENTURY works, reframing the grid through distributed connections.

Stills from NETWORK C, 2012/2022.
Reas’ Networks draw on Paul Baran’s diagrams for distributed communication systems. Conceived to model resilience against attack, Baran’s schematics imagined topologies without a single point of failure. Reas translates this logic into dynamic fields of color and motion, turning a technical structure into a shifting visual field.

The works were inspired by the vibrancy of Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942), where the grid is transformed by rhythm and light into a field of energy. In particular, Network C was created as a companion piece to Mondrian’s painted structure, translating it into the logic of data flows. If Mondrian’s canvas captured the pulse of New York’s streets in the 1940s, Network C visualizes the distributed architectures of the internet era—motion, color, and connection mapped into perpetual variation.

Continuities within CENTURY

Across CENTURY, artworks from the twentieth century function as starting points rather than models to reproduce. Kelly’s recombined paintings, Rickey’s kinetic structures, Soto’s optical instability, Molnár’s rule-based drawings, Vasarely’s permutations, and Mondrian’s grid each provide different ways of thinking about systems and variation.

Software changes the conditions of these ideas. A composition can reorganize itself continuously. A fixed structure can become responsive. A finite set of rules can produce large numbers of variations. A network can replace the grid as an organizing structure.

The works also approach time in different ways. CENTURY continually recombines its compositions. METACENTURY and CENTURY-XXX extend earlier artistic systems through new variations. Networks are always in motion as information passes among their nodes. By contrast, CENTURY 2052 is structured around a single future transition.

Related Artworks
Browse the CENTURY category on the REAS INDEX.

Further Exploration
Clarke, Jay A., Thomas Crow, Rachel Federman, and Cynthia Burlingham, eds. Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio. London: Modern Art Press, 2022.

Franke, Herbert W. Computer Graphics, Computer Art. Translated by Gustav Metzger. London and New York: Phaidon Press, 1971.

Haemmerli, Thomas, and Brigitte Ulmer, eds. Circle! Square! Progress!: Zurich’s Concrete Avant-garde. Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, Richard Paul Lohse and Their Times. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2024.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–64.

Molnár, Vera. Untitled (Study for Inclinaisons). 1971. Felt-tip marker on paper. Anne and Michael Spalter Digital Archive. Accessed August 27, 2025. https://spalterdigital.com/artworks/untitled-study-for-inclinasions-2/.

Reas, Casey. “In Conversation with Casey Reas on CENTURY.” Art Blocks Journal, October 2022. Accessed August 20, 2025. https://www.artblocks.io/articles/in-conversation-with-casey-reas-on-century.

Rickey, George. Constructivism: Origins and Evolution. New York: George Braziller, 1967.

Vasarely, Victor. Planetary Folklore. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1973.

Selected Exhibition History

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms. Toledo Museum of Art. Toledo, OH. 12 July – 30 November 2025. Curated by Julia Kaganskiy. CENTURY. [E-25-04]

Electric Op. Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Buffalo, NY. 27 September 2024 – 27 January 2025. Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan. METASOTO. [E-24-07]

À La Recherche de Vera Molnár. Wolfgang Museum. Budapest, Hungary. 10 February – 14 April 2024. Hommage à Molnár. Exhibition subsequently presented at Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey, 19 September – 26 January 2025. [E-24-01]

Machine Imaginaire | Vera Molnar. DAM Projects. Berlin, Germany. 28 January – 1 April 2023. Debut of Hommage à Molnár. [E-23-01]

Peer to Peer. Feral File. Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan. Debut of METASOTO. [E-22-07]

SonarMàtica. Sónar. Barcelona, Spain. 16 – 18 June 2022. CENTURY-XXX. [E-22-02]

The Digital. Miami Art Week. 3 – 5 December 2021. Curated by Sofia Garcia. CENTURY. [E-21-06]

Short Cuts. CentrePasquArt. Biel, Switzerland. 18 April – 6 June 2015. Curated by Daniel Sciboz. CENTURY. [E-15-04]

Zeitzünder. DAM Gallery. Frankfurt, Germany. 9 November 2013 – 1 February 2014. Network C. [E-13-17]

Run Computer Run: Examining Aesthetics. Rua Red. Dublin, Ireland. 24 May – 13 July 2013. Curated by Nora O’Murchú. Network D software and prints. [E-13-06]

CENTURY. Gallery [DAM] Berlin. Berlin, Germany. 29 September – 27 November 2012. Debut Network C, Signal to Noise (Software 1) and related prints. [S-14]