Casey Reas

Born in Troy, Ohio, in 1972, Casey Reas studied design at the University of Cincinnati and earned a master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Based in Los Angeles, he teaches at UCLA. His work draws on conceptual art and the history of drawing while considering the particular possibilities of computation.

Processing, which Reas initiated with Ben Fry in 2001, helped make programming a practical medium for a much wider community of artists and designers. Free and open source, it combined an approachable coding environment with immediate visual feedback. Its adoption in art and design classrooms worldwide made it influential in how a generation learned to work with code. Reas also co-founded the Processing Foundation and Feral File, supporting education and new ways to exhibit and collect software art.

Reas provides an important bridge between the pioneers of computer art and later generations working with generative systems and on-chain editions. This continuity is explicit in Hommage à Molnár (2023), which develops variations from Vera Molnár’s visual language, and in his wider engagement with rule-based abstraction. Through his art, teaching and shared tools, Reas carries earlier questions about rules, chance and authorship into the conditions of contemporary digital practice.

His museum exhibitions also bring these histories together. An Empty Room (2023) was commissioned for LACMA’s Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982. In 2025, he participated in Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms at the Toledo Museum of Art, an exhibition spanning historical rule-based art and contemporary generative practice. The presentation included Century #913, an interactive software work associated with an Ethereum NFT, within a show that also featured Vera Molnár, Sol LeWitt, Tyler Hobbs and Dmitri Cherniak.