Casey Reas

Biography

Casey Reas is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern generative art and creative coding. In the early 2000s, alongside Ben Fry, he co-founded Processing, an open-source, design-oriented programming language and environment that has since become a foundational tool for a vast majority of contemporary generative artists, educators, and creative technologists. Reas's own art practice explores systems, chance, and emergent behavior, translating simple algorithmic rules into complex, often organic-feeling visual compositions. Since the early 2000s, his work has been exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group shows at major institutions including MoMA, ZKM Karlsruhe, bitforms, DAM Gallery, and leading auction houses such as Phillips, Sotheby's, and Christie's. Several of his most iconic pieces are held in the permanent collections of prestigious museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Beyond his own artwork, Reas founded Feral File, a curated, group-oriented digital art exhibition platform that has featured many prominent artists working with blockchain and digital media. His long-form generative projects on platforms like Art Blocks and fxhash often pay homage to modernist aesthetics, echoing early 20th-century abstraction and systems art through a contemporary computational lens. Reas also works under the alter ego Caesuras, a moniker used for some of his more vibrant, bold, and experimental blockchain-based work, distinct from the output released under his own name. As an educator, Reas is a professor at UCLA's Department of Design Media Arts, where he continues to shape new generations of artists working at the intersection of code, systems, and visual art.