Casey Reas
Day in the Life
“Artists are essential to our humanity and to our culture. The arts exist within a broader context of human knowledge – across disciplines and fields of study. They’ve been here since the very beginning and provide meaning and context for everything. We can’t be human without the arts.” – Casey Reas, Professor, Department of Design Media Arts
An artist, programmer, and educator who has developed an influential curriculum around emerging technologies in UCLA’s Department of Design Media Arts, Casey Reas is making an exponential impact on the visual arts and creative industries. His revolutionary open-source programming language, Processing (created with Ben Fry), is the first software platform of its kind to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context. The Processing language, along with several seminal publications authored by Reas, is being taught in visual arts, architecture, computer science, and digital humanities departments at hundreds of institutions and is being used by thousands of designers and artists worldwide.
His artwork combines his virtuosic use of digital tools with his distinctive and deeply intuitive vision, taking the form of drawings, murals, and interactive media that are paving the way for a whole new community of visual artists in the 21st century. Reas conceives of his classrooms as laboratories in which he, alongside his students is inventing a new curriculum, one that is rapidly materializing at the intersection of the visual arts and emerging technologies.
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