METASOTO #37

Casey Reas has been making abstract artworks with code for over twenty years. Crucially, he prefers that viewers experience his dynamic images as live “performances,” instead of screen recordings—that is, the work always should be generated in real time by a computer executing his instructions. (This is somewhat analogous to the difference between listening to a symphony live in a concert hall and as a recording.) In this way, he invites us to appreciate not only the outputs of his code—which are visually related to modernist art—but also the material and conceptual foundation of his work in the language of computation, which is his chosen “instrument.” In recent years, Reas has used the...View all