Casey REAS

Casey Reas is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. He studied design at the University of Cincinnati and took a master's degree in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. In 2001 he and Ben Fry created Processing, an open-source programming language and environment for artists and designers, and he later co-founded the Processing Foundation. He is a professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA, where he chairs the department. In 2020 he co-founded Feral File, a website where digital art is shown and sold to collectors.

His work takes the form of software, prints, video and installations. The Whitney Museum commissioned {Software} Structures for its artport website, a set of programs that answer Sol LeWitt's written instructions with code. That project led to the Process series (2004 to 2010), in which each work is a short set of rules that software can carry out without end. Process Compendium archives the series as still images. The Whitney, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre Pompidou and LACMA hold his work.

He has released works on the blockchain since 2019. CENTURY came out on Art Blocks Curated in June 2021: 1,000 outputs of a system that cuts painted surfaces apart and reorders them. It draws equally on Ellsworth Kelly's Paris collages of the 1950s and on the chance movement of George Rickey's kinetic sculptures. Pre-Process followed on Art Blocks Curated in November 2022. In August 2023 collectors minted 923 EMPTY ROOMS in person with Bright Moments over six days in six cities, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. That November bitforms in New York opened his solo show It Doesn't Exist (In Any Other Form), which debuted There's No Distance as a series of 128 software works, released on fxhash in December.