kree8tiv | Casey Reas - How To Draw With Code

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Casey Reas - How To Draw With Code

Casey Reas

Artist Casey Reas uses software code to express his thoughts—starting with a sketch, composing it in code, and witnessing the imagery that it ultimately creates. Using the software he helped to create, Reas uses color to convey emotion and movement.

F or Casey Reas, software is the most natural medium to work with. He uses code to express his thoughts—starting with a sketch, composing it in code, and witnessing the imagery that it ultimately creates.

In the video above, Reas is at work his studio where he uses color to convey emotion with his programming language Processing. —

Together with Ben Fry, he created the software while at MIT, and it is now used by thousands of artists and designers worldwide.

A former student of John Maeda, Reas is an artist whose conceptual and minimal works explore ideas through the contemporary lens of software. Reas’s software and images derive from short text instructions explaining processes that define networks.

Reas attributes his involvement in the creation of the programming language Processing to Maeda’s book, Design by Numbers however while Maeda tends to be considered a “digital” designer, he has consistently explored the boundaries—and possibilities—of varying expressive modes, from pencils to computers, and his reputation, until recently, was built on his penchant for innovative thinking and an insistence on making computation accessible to all.

Reas has shown his work at the Whitney Museum of American Art's artport, Ars Electronica in Austria, ZKM in Germany, Transmediale in Berlin, GAFFTA in San Francisco, Uijeongbu International Digital Art Festival in Korea, the Danish Film Institute, bitforms gallery in New York and Seoul, IAMAS and ICC in Japan, the Microwave International Media Art Festival in Hong Kong, and the Sonar Festival in Barcelona.

While a graduate student and researcher in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MIT Media Lab from 1999 to 2001, Reas built on his professional experience and undergraduate studies in design at the University of Cincinnati, and spent the next two years developing software and electronics as an artistic exploration. After graduating, Reas began to exhibit his software and installations internationally in galleries and festivals.

In 2003, Reas moved to Los Angeles where he is currently an associate professor in the department of Design | Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.