by Casey Reas
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Casey Reas is an artist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Reas has a masters degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences as well as a bachelors degree from the School of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning at the University of Cincinnati. With Ben Fry, Reas initiated Processing, an open source programming language and environment for designers and artists, in 2010. Reas is the co-author of the books Form + Code in Design, Art and Architecture and Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, most recently in North Carolina as a part of the Deep Surface exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in downtown Raleigh.
Reas’s work focuses on the relationship between naturally evolved systems and those that are synthetic, through form, code, art and new media. He explores the generative relationship of new technology as applied to naturally static territories. Reas’s contribution to volume 35 of The Student Publication will form a visual essay related directly to his Process Compendium project from 2010. The visual essay will focus on a sequential set of images that visualize the transformation of a diagram through software, with annotations that are both explanatory and provocative of the form and theory of programming within the context of the arts.