Casey Reas, professor of design media arts in the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, is exhibiting work in the Honor Fraser gallery’s current group exhibition, “Thin as Thorns, In These Thoughts in Us.” The exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery centers around themes of creative artificial intelligence and generative art and will run through Feb. 20, 2021.
Reas’ work at the Honor Fraser gallery uses neural networks to generate a vast number of images by carefully mutating the original source images, which are culled from specific cinematic works. The images then become a new film, which are not “edited” in a traditional, sequential way, but rather spatially, as Reas guides the system along different axes within, and through, visual elements. The end result is a record of both the system’s attempt to reconcile the mutations Reas is interested in and the movement between data points.
Reas and other artists in the exhibition aim to relinquish sole authorship of their work through improvised collaborations with their mechanical counterparts. The artists focus on training AI systems to evoke their personal aesthetics across a range of media, from rock music to painting to film. These tactics of production allow the artists’ finished works to transcend their status as individual art objects, instead granting them the power to memorialize the essence of exchange between human and machine.
Earlier this year, Reas received the 2020 Lumen Prize Moving Image Award for his audiovisual work, “Compressed Cinema.” He worked with composer Jan St. Werner to create a series of videos that are derived from a set of film stills and accompanied by Werner’s audio tracks. The collection of five videos are the result of more than three years of experimentation and developing new techniques for creating cinematic media with generative adversarial networks.
Reas’ software, prints, and installations have been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations, and he balances solo work in the studio with collaborations with architects and musicians. Reas’ work is in a range of private and public collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2001, Reas started Processing with Ben Fry, an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.
