Casey Reas


Casey Edwin Barker Reas, also known as C. E. B. Reas or Casey Reas, is an American artist whose conceptual, procedural and minimal artworks explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas is perhaps best known for having created, with Ben Fry, the Processing programming language.

Education and early work

Reas was born Casey Edwin Barker Reas in 1972 in Troy, Ohio. He studied design at the University of Cincinnati and then spent the next two years developing software and electronics as an artistic exploration. While studying design in Cincinnati, Reas was a member of a band called 'nancy' with Scott Devendorf and Matt Berninger, who went on to become members of The National. Reas went on to direct four music videos for the band's 2017 album, Sleep Well Beast.
In 2001, Reas earned a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences as a part of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's MIT Media Lab.

Art career

After graduating, Reas began to exhibit his software and installations internationally in galleries and festivals.
Reas's software generated images derive from short software-based instructions that visual create processes. The instructions are expressed in different media including natural language, machine code, and computer simulations, resulting in both dynamic and static images. Each translation reveals a different perspective on the process and combines with the others to produce continually evolving visual traces.
Since 2012, Reas has incorporated broadcast images into his work, algorithmically distorting them to create abstractions that retain traces of their original, representational function.
In 2003, Reas moved to Los Angeles where he is currently a Professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Processing

In 2001, together with MIT PhD candidate Ben Fry, Reas created the Processing programming language. Processing is widely used by thousands of artists and designers worldwide, and by educators teaching the fundamentals of programing in art and design schools.

Exhibitions

He has shown his work at:
Reas' work is held in the following collections:
Reas' public artwork A Mathematical Theory of Communication was commissioned by Landmarks, the public art collection of the University of Texas at Austin in 2014. A Mathematical Theory of Communication received Americans for the Arts' Public Art Network Award in 2015.

Books