Casey Reas (American, b. 1972) is a software artist who writes custom code that generates images, prints, and installations, treating the system of instructions, not any single output, as the artwork. His practice draws on conceptual and instruction-based art, particularly the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt, treating written rules as central to the work. In 2001 he co-created the open-source programming language Processing with Ben Fry.
He moved to Los Angeles in 2003 to teach as a Professor of Design Media Arts at UCLA. In 2004 the Whitney Museum's artport commissioned Software Structures, for which Reas translated three of LeWitt's wall drawings into written rules after asking whether conceptual art's history was relevant to software as art. Working with Jared Tarbell, Robert Hodgin, and William Ngan, he coded twenty-six software pieces from those rules, restoring the project in 2016 so it would run in current web browsers. From 2004 to 2014 he developed Process Compendium, defining Elements composed of Forms and Behaviors whose relationships he specified in text before coding them into drawing systems. He has described the series as the first time he built an entire visual system from nothing, working on it intensively for seven years.
