Casey Reas
Casey REAS (a.k.a. Casey Edwin Barker Reas, C. E. B. Reas) was born in 1972 in Troy, Ohio, and lives and works in Los Angeles. His software, prints, and installations have been exhibited internationally at museums and galleries across the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work is held in major public and private collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Reas is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Cincinnati. In 2001, together with Ben Fry, he co-created Processing, the open-source programming language and environment that has shaped generations of artists working with code.
Featured Work
Process 14 (Software 2), 2012.
Process 14 (Software 2), 2012 belongs to a series that traces its origin to a 2001 commission from the Whitney Museum of American Art, which invited Reas to translate Sol LeWitt's instructional wall drawings into software for the museum's online platform, Artport. That project — later exhibited at the Whitney itself in Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 — established the working method behind every Process piece since: a written text of rules, executed as code, generating images that could not have been fully anticipated by the artist who wrote them.
Process 14 is one realization of that system, captured at a specific moment in its unfolding. The dense, petal-like clusters of color are not composed but accumulated — the visible trace of simple instructions, repeated and interacting, over time. It is less a picture of something than a record of a rule being run.
This piece was previously exhibited in "Automat und Mensch," Zürich, Kate Vass Galerie, 2019.
Further Reading
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EMERGENCE - INTERVIEW WITH CASEY REAS
Kate Vass interviews Casey Reas, artist and co-creator of Processing, the influential programming language and environment that has shaped generations of artists working with code.
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HISTORY OF GENERATIVE ART - PROCESSING
In our History of Generative Art series, we spotlight Processing. Created in 2001 by Casey Reas and Ben Fry, it made programming accessible to artists and designers, helping shape code into a powerful medium for visual and interactive art.
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CASEY REAS ON THE HISTORY OF GENERATIVE ART
The Le Random team speaks with Casey Reas, artist, UCLA professor, and cofounder of Processing and Feral File, about the history of generative art, the overlooked importance of experimental video art, and more.
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THE POWER OF PROCESSING
Casey Reas and Lauren Lee McCarthy explore the future of social software with Alex Estorick in this conversation for Right Click Save.
Selected Exhibitions
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EMERGENCE, ZURICH, 2026
EMERGENCE is conceived as a living exhibition and traces the evolution of complexity from simple computational rules to collective intelligence. Released over six weeks, each chapter reveals new artists and conversations exploring how interaction gives rise to pattern, organism, and society.
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AUTOMAT UND MENSCH 2.0, ZURICH, 2024
In 2024, as we journeyed five years back in time to revisit the "Automat und Mensch" show, our aim was to reflect upon the trajectory of Al in art and the evolution of generative art over the past half-decade.
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METAVASARELY AND AN EMPTY ROOM, LACMA, LA, 2023
In conjunction with the exhibition Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952-1982, LACMA's Art + Technology Lab presents a two-part digital work by Casey Reas: a simulation of and homage to Victor Vasarely's unrealized proposal for LACMA's Art and Technology Program (1967-1971).
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AUTOMAT UND MENSCH, ZURICH, 2019
The Automat & Mensch exhibition is, above all, an opportunity to put important work by generative artists spanning the last 70 years into context by showing it in a single location.
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TOX SCREEN, ART CENTER, SHANGHAI, 2015
In Tox Screen, Casey Reas transformed local television broadcasts through custom software, scrambling their images and narratives into a wall-sized generative video installation.
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CENTURY, DAM, BERLIN, 2012
In CENTURY, Casey Reas transformed 100 influential twentieth-century artworks into algorithmic compositions, reflecting on a century of art history through software and print.
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GOLAN LEVIN & CASEY REAS THE ART OF CODE, BITFORMS, NYC, 2003
The Art of Code brought together Golan Levin and Casey Reas in an early two-person exhibition exploring software as an artistic medium.
by Casey Reas
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Unique
Software, Mac Mini Computer
Exhibited at “Automat und Mensch” show, Zürich, Kate Vass Galerie, 2019