From one moment to the next, Casey Reas’ artwork transforms, refusing to ever remain the same.
His recent digital work “Americans!” represents this mutability, depicting constantly fluctuating pixels and colors so no two identical images ever occur.
“One thing about making artwork that’s software is it’s not like a film with a beginning and end, but always running and changing,” Reas said. “It’s always drawing itself anew.”
Reas, a digital artist and professor in the UCLA Design | Media Arts program, sold “Americans!” on Oct. 10 through the New York auction house Phillips. The piece was estimated at $12,500. This is the first time a brick-and-mortar auctioneer has sold digital art made with the programming software Processing.
Using 20 minutes of random television footage captured by antennae, “Americans!” samples random colors and shapes from the footage to build a collage that changes every second.
Processing was created by Reas and fellow student Ben Fry while attending Massachusetts Institute of Technologyin 2001.
Processing is a programming language, developmental tool and online community used by artists to create digital images and to teach students how to make digital media.
Reas said Fry and he decided to create Processing as a language specifically for visual designers to facilitate their work. At the time, if art students wanted to learn programming for their work they were forced to go through the computer science department. Reas said they were unhappy with this method because it was difficult for students who thought in a visual way to engage in traditional, numerically based programming environments.
“With our invention of the language Processing, our goal was not to reinvent the wheel but make something that was useful and pragmatic for visual designers,” Reas said. “We wanted to take existing paradigms of programming and adapt them to the visual arts.”
Reas and Fry adapted computer science programming domains into a more visual language by focusing the process on resembling drawing or sketching.
Working with Processing, artists have a general idea of the color and shapes they want in the final product but do not know what it will ultimately look like. Reas said Processing allows these ideas to be quickly translated into code and then easily rewritten if the result does not match the artist’s vision.
“Processing is better for our work because it allows us to focus our time and energy on visual expression rather than writing a lot of infrastructure,” Reas said.
He added that Processing’s compatibility with the process of creating digital media made it the ideal language to utilize for “Americans!”
Reas made the entire project with Processing over the course of a year and it is the result of numerous “sketches” that started as vague ideas. These translated into programs and codes that required tweaking as Reas saw what matched his vision.
The concept behind “Americans!” explores the cultural phenomenon of television and its ubiquity, Reas said.
He said he was interested by the television signals that constantly surround us and move through our bodies. Reas’ program uses these signals as raw material to dynamically build a collage at 30 frames per second that samples different colors from the footage.
This method allows every frame of the shifting collage to be a different combination of colors and shapes.
The originality of “Americans!” as a digital art form attracted the attention of Lindsay Howard, curator of the Phillips auction. She said she wanted to showcase it as a representative of the burgeoning field of digital art.
“Casey represents the most successful of digital artists because there’s clarity to his practice and vision,” Howard said. “Both people who understand the technical aspect of the algorithms and the creative side of the shapes and colors can appreciate it.”
Daniel Schiffman, who has worked with Reas and Fry to maintain Processing’s free accessibility, said this ability of Reas’ work to integrate complex technicalities with art makes it attractive.
“Casey lets the technical rules be the primary drive of the artwork but also has an aesthetic sense that allows him to show the simple geometry, color and lines contained within the algorithms,” Schiffman said.
Although Processing has had a lot of popularity among universities like UCLA, Reas and Fry have not acquired any profit directly from the software.
The software is completely open source because Reas said easy accessibility to infrastructure was the main goal of Processing.
“The reason we created Processing was we cared deeply about people making software and artists using it for their work,” Reas said. “We are excited to see what people are making with it and this motivates us to keep doing it.”