Casey Reas

Casey Reas writes software to explore emergent systems. His work brings together conceptualism, systems theory, experimental film and animation, and drawing. While software is at the core of his practice, his work spans installation, works on paper, and live performance.

Reas has been featured in exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, SF; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; MIT Museum, Cambridge, MA; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, China; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Eyebeam, New York, NY; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; and the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany. Commissions have been awarded by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the New World Symphony, Miami, FL.

Reas is the co-creator, with Ben Fry, of Processing, an open source programming language and environment. The project was initiated in 2001; in 2012, Reas and Fry started the Processing Foundation along with Daniel Shiffman. In 2012, Reas co-wrote and designed the book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press, 2013). Reas and Fry published Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists (MIT Press, 2007/2014). With Chandler McWilliams and LUST, Reas published Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), a non-technical introduction to the history, theory, and practice of software in the visual arts.

Reas is a professor in the Department of Design Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a Masters degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelors degree from the College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati.

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