Century #64

Interactive custom software, NFT, and Ethereum blockchain, 2021, 2025
Private collection

With Century, Casey REAS pays homage to paintings and drawings from the 20th century and the influence of midcentury abstract art on his own artistic practice. REAS describes these works as landscapes. Each one of the 1,000 unique pieces is an abstract moving image that is always in flux, shifting subtly as if in response to invisible forces.

Century highlights two important qualities unique to digital materiality and software-based art:

• the infinite variability of generative art and programmable media, which can continue evolving over time to produce new configurations
• the medium’s responsive, interactive nature, which allows for the work to change based on external inputs

REAS is one of the most influential digital artists of the last 20 years. In 2001 he cofounded Processing, an open-source graphics library and coding tool kit designed to teach nonprogrammers the fundamentals of coding in a visual, creative context. Processing is the most popular coding language used by generative artists today.