Casey Reas
CHAPTER I — CELL
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Kate Vass: In Software Structures, you transformed Sol LeWitt's conceptual instructions into executable code, revealing that an instruction and an algorithm share the same underlying logic. Looking back more than twenty years later, do you think software has become the dominant conceptual medium of our time?
Casey Reas: Software has become one of the most important extensions of conceptual art. Conceptual artists established that an artwork could reside in an idea, a set of instructions, or a system rather than in a singular object. That was central to Software Structures. LeWitt’s instructions and software both define a space of possibilities, but LeWitt’s work is interpreted and carried out by people, while code is formalized for execution by a machine. Software therefore makes it possible to create artworks that remain active, variable, and responsive. It has not replaced painting, sculpture, or other media, but it has changed how we understand where an artwork can exist—in the rules, relationships, and processes that generate what we experience.
KV: Your work consistently places the artwork in the system rather than in its output. When viewers stand before one of your pieces, what do you hope they understand: the image they see, the process that produced it, or the idea that made the process possible?
CR: My thinking about these ideas has continued to evolve. I don’t think of the image, the process, and the idea as separate parts of the work. The image is where the viewer encounters the artwork, but it is one moment within a larger system. I don’t expect viewers to understand the code or reconstruct the process that produced what they see. I hope they sense that the work is active rather than fixed, that the image could have been different, and that it belongs to a larger field of possibilities. The artwork does not reside exclusively in the image, the process, or the idea, but in the relationships among them. The system gives the work its logic and potential, while each image makes that system perceptible.
KV: Conway showed that simple rules can generate unexpected complexity. Your practice suggests that this principle extends beyond cellular automata to culture itself. Do you believe emergence is a property of computation, or is it a more fundamental property of reality that computation simply makes visible?
CR: I don’t think emergence is a property of computation. Computation gives us a particularly direct way to construct and observe it. In Tissue and the Process series, each element follows a small set of rules, but the larger structure is not designed in advance. It emerges through the interactions among the elements. In MicroImage, very simple relationships between simulated sensors and motors produce behavior that appears far more complex than the machinery that generates it. Small changes in the environment can reorganize the entire field.
These works are abstractions, not claims that reality is software. But they reflect something I see in biological, social, and cultural systems: form and behavior often arise through the interactions of many parts, without a central author directing the whole. Computation makes this visible because the rules can be isolated, changed, and run again. It allows us to watch complexity develop through relationships over time.
KV: Through Processing, you've influenced generations of artists who think in systems rather than images. Has watching others build upon that language changed your own understanding of authorship? At what point does a tool become part of the artwork's legacy?
CR: Learning to create art with code changed my personal understanding of authorship because it made clear that authorship does not require control over what happens when the code runs. Watching Processing develop extended that understanding. Ben Fry and I created the initial language and environment, and we continued to develop it for twenty years. But Processing became more meaningful through what other people made with it, how they taught it, and how they extended and transformed it. Much of what Processing became was beyond anything I could have anticipated.
Processing’s legacy is not only the work made with it, but the ways of thinking and working that grew around it. It introduced many artists and designers to software as a medium for sketching, experimentation, and personal expression. Each work made with Processing has its own author, but the shared language, habits, and possibilities that developed through its use belong to a much larger history.
KV: Can emergence itself become conscious? After more than two decades of constructing autonomous systems, do you believe there is a meaningful distinction between a system that generates complexity and one that possesses agency? Or is consciousness an entirely different category?
CR: When I describe my systems as autonomous, I mean that they can continue to operate without my ongoing intervention. They act within the structures I have created, and their behavior can surprise me, but I don’t think that means they possess agency in the way a living being does. Complexity can resemble intention, especially when a system responds to its environment or behaves in ways we cannot easily predict, but unpredictability is not the same as consciousness.
I think consciousness belongs to a different category, although I don’t know where its boundaries are. The systems I create do not have desires, experiences, or an awareness of what they are doing. What interests me is how quickly we begin to project those qualities onto them. Emergent behavior can make a system appear alive, and that appearance may reveal more about our own desire to find intention and agency than it does about the system itself.
ARTIST 2 OF 2
6th August