Casey Reas: A Remote Studio at HEK Holds Its Last Session
Since August 28, Casey Reas has used HEK's online space as a studio, turning a live watercolor into software each Friday, and Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ holds its final session this Friday before closing on October 25.
For 2 months, Casey Reas has not had an exhibition at HEK so much as a studio there. Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ, curated by Sabine Himmelsbach, opened on August 28 on virtual.hek.ch, the online space of the House of Electronic Arts in Basel, and runs only online until October 25. The rule is simple. Every Friday, Reas makes a small watercolor live in front of visitors, then translates it into a score for his software agents to move through a synthetic environment. Each week adds a new sketch to a body of work that did not exist when the show opened.
The project picks up the Process Series, which Reas developed from 2004 to 2010. Those works explored emergence in natural systems, "using software not as a way of simulating nature," he told HEK, "but as a way of growing form inspired by how nature operates." The new sketches push that thinking about ecology and emergence into new territory. HEK frames the show with a line from the synthetic biologist Kate Adamala: "Life is not binary. That's why I'm hesitant to call this 'alive'." A still from Sketch #006, which Reas shared on October 3, shows what the agents leave behind: tangled, threadlike marks in green, blue, red and violet, spread across a white field like growth seen under a lens.
The format reverses how Reas usually works. "The more traditional way of working for me is to be in the studio for a couple of years, then have an opening and talk about the work," he said. "I'm really interested in inverting that and being in conversation about the work while it's being created." He set up the sessions around an overhead camera trained on the paper as he paints, and admitted at the start that he did not know what visitors would be seeing 2 months later.
The answer arrives this week. "My online exhibition/residency at HEK is closing this weekend," Reas posted on October 21, inviting people to his final studio session on Friday, October 23, at 9 AM in Los Angeles, noon in New York and 6 PM in Basel, followed by a celebration in HEK's Common Garden. It is a fitting home for an artist who has long pushed software art toward new ways of being shown and held: in 2020 he co-founded Feral File with Sean Moss-Pultz, a platform for computational art whose exhibitions mint on Ethereum and Tezos.
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