Casey REAS

“Pixel Rugs” by Travess Smalley Now available on vetroeditions.com 💫

Lauren Lee McCarthy built p5.js, one of the most widely used open-source creative coding platforms in the world, and makes work that probes what it means to live inside systems of surveillance and algorithmic decision-making. Casey Reas co-founded Processing, the programming language that opened creative coding to a generation of artists and designers, and has spent decades making generative work at the intersection of computation and visual culture. Together, they’ve created a collaborative installation, and it’s at Flux this Saturday. Explore it at Flux Festival this Saturday, April 25 at Blum Gallery Los Angeles. Tickets are sold out. Join our email list via the link in bio to hear about future Flux Festival events. #FluxFestival

SOURCE: Generative Art Lecture Series with Martin Grasser This autobiographical lecture from Martin shares his story: how he began working with generative art, the projects that defined his practice, and what he’s exploring now. Martin Grasser Hosted by Jeff Davis, The Generative Art Foundation Location: UCLA Broad Art Center (EDA) and YouTube Date: 14 April 2026 Time: 5pm Pacific RSVP for YouTube link. Link in bio! Co-sponsored by: Social Software The Generative Art Foundation UCLA Design Media Arts

SOURCE: Generative Art Lecture Series with Mitchell F. Chan This autobiographical lecture from Mitchell shares his story: how he began working with generative art, the projects that defined his practice, and what he’s exploring now. Mitchell F. Chan Hosted by Lauren Lee McCarthy, Social Software Location: Zoom Date: 7 April 2026 Time: 5pm Pacific RSVP for Zoom access. Link in bio! Co-sponsored by: UCLA Social Software The Generative Art Foundation Coming Soon! Martin Grasser Hosted by Jeff Davis, The Generative Art Foundation Location: UCLA Broad Art Center (EDA) and Zoom Date: 14 April 2026 Time: 5pm Pacific

SOURCE: Generative Art Lecture Series with Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti) This autobiographical lecture from Operator shares their story: how they began working with generative art, the projects that defined their practice, and what they’re exploring now. Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti) Hosted by Casey REAS, Social Software Location: Zoom Date: 31 March 2026 Time: Noon Pacific RSVP for Zoom access. Link in bio! Co-sponsored by: UCLA Social Software The Generative Art Foundation Coming Soon! Mitchell F. Chan Hosted by Lauren Lee McCarthy, Social Software Location: Zoom Date: 7 April 2026 Time: 5pm Pacific Martin Grasser Hosted by Jeff Davis, The Generative Art Foundation Location: UCLA Broad Art Center (EDA) and Zoom Date: 14 April 2026 Time: 5pm Pacific

Simulacrum (E-P-01), 2026 Plotter Drawing on Strathmore Bristol Smooth Surface, Sakura Pigma Micron 08 #19, #32, #36 + #42 19 × 19 in / 48.3 × 48.3 cm Signed verso

Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) is the latest work in Casey REAS’ Still Life series. The series draws on the forms and conceptual framework of the five Platonic solids: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Plato’s Theory of Forms is central to this lineage, shaping his understanding of truth, beauty, and knowledge. For Plato, the world grasped through the senses is not fully real, but an imitation of a higher, invisible realm of perfect, eternal, and unchanging Forms. Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) explores the dodecahedron, and future works will engage the remaining four solids. Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) connects Plato’s worldview to computer graphics, where images are generated ex nihilo—from code rather than physical materials. Forms are not represented directly, but instantiated through mathematical rules and procedural processes. What appears on screen is not a depiction of an object, but a series of Forms articulated through lines and resolved into pixels. In the Still Life series, Platonic solids are not depicted as stable volumes, but decomposed into pixels. Each pixel’s values are translated into lines of varying position and color. From these simple rules emerge visual fields that oscillate between structure and dissolution. Designed to run continuously, the work never repeats. Rather than producing fixed compositions, the series operates as a kinetic system that unfolds over time. Platonic Solids in Still Life software series: Cube → EARTH Tetrahedron → FIRE Octahedron → AIR Dodecahedron → COSMOS Icosahedron → WATER This work is co-presented by Art Blocks and Feral File in March 2026. The Still Life exhibitions began in 2016 with There’s No Distance at bitforms, New York. The most recent, Purely Platonic, was presented at DAM Projects, Berlin, in summer 2025. @artblocks_io @feralfile

Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) is the latest work in Casey REAS’ Still Life series. The series draws on the forms and conceptual framework of the five Platonic solids: cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron. Plato’s Theory of Forms is central to this lineage, shaping his understanding of truth, beauty, and knowledge. For Plato, the world grasped through the senses is not fully real, but an imitation of a higher, invisible realm of perfect, eternal, and unchanging Forms. Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) explores the dodecahedron, and future works will engage the remaining four solids. Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) connects Plato’s worldview to computer graphics, where images are generated ex nihilo—from code rather than physical materials. Forms are not represented directly, but instantiated through mathematical rules and procedural processes. What appears on screen is not a depiction of an object, but a series of Forms articulated through lines and resolved into pixels. In the Still Life series, Platonic solids are not depicted as stable volumes, but decomposed into pixels. Each pixel’s values are translated into lines of varying position and color. From these simple rules emerge visual fields that oscillate between structure and dissolution. Designed to run continuously, the work never repeats. Rather than producing fixed compositions, the series operates as a kinetic system that unfolds over time. Platonic Solids in Still Life software series: Cube → EARTH Tetrahedron → FIRE Octahedron → AIR Dodecahedron → COSMOS Icosahedron → WATER This work is co-presented by Art Blocks and Feral File in March 2026. The Still Life exhibitions began in 2016 with There’s No Distance at bitforms, New York. The most recent, Purely Platonic, was presented at DAM Projects, Berlin, in summer 2025. @artblocks_io @feralfile

Coming soon to @feralfile

My collaboration with @zeitweitz as featured in the November 2025 issue of @artforum “IN SILICO,” 2024–, extends my sustained inquiry into how code can generate organic form. Since the early 2000s, I have written custom software systems to produce images from encoded rules, merging instruction-based art with the evolving capacities of computation. This body of work introduces generative adversarial networks (GANs), using models trained exclusively on images of plants that I collected through foraging. The “In Silico” project situates GANs in relation to photography. Just as a photographer’s lenses, emulsions, and chemicals shape the field of possible photographs, a trained GAN defines the scope and style of its outputs. Artistic agency resides in the choices surrounding it: what to capture, how to process it, how to “develop” the model through training, and how to select from or intervene in the resulting images. In this sense, “In Silico” is not about algorithms but about learning an instrument deeply enough to improvise with it. “In Silico” comprises three series. The “Technical Images,” 2024–, establish a dialogue with the material history of photography. Created in collaboration with Erika Weitz, they employ the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process, one of photography’s earliest techniques, to fix GAN-generated botanical images onto aluminum plates. The series explicitly references Vilém Flusser’s notion of the “technical image,” which describes how apparatuses mediate vision and condition the production of images. By introducing GAN imagery to this early photographic process, we staged an encounter between two paradigms: the capture of light on a sensitized plate and the computational generation of form from data. The artifacts of both—the swirls and imperfections of collodion, the distortions and uncanny morphologies of GANs—are fused into single objects. In this convergence, the series situates machine learning not outside but within the continuum of photographic processes, grounding the “In Silico” body of work in a lineage that stretches back to photography’s origins.

Proud to have 3 of our artists @refikanadol @clmntvalla and @reas included in the collection and exhibited at the spectacular @google Gradient Canopy building in Mountain View. Thank you @googleartsculture and @grayareaorg for your incredible effort and dedication to this long journey. This is a pivotal moment for the support of new media art by a major corporation and is much needed for the genre.