@REAS

Casey Reas is an artist and co-director of UCLA Social Software. Co-founder of Feral File, Processing Foundation, and Processing

Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ @ HEK

Join us on August 28 for the online opening at https://virtual.hek.ch! More information: https://hek.ch

For two months, I will inhabit virtual.hek.ch as a remote studio, creating a new sketch for an artwork each week. Every Friday, I’ll make a small watercolor painting and then translate it into a score for my software agents to move through a synthetic environment. This work extends my Process Series 2004–2010, pushing my ideas about ecology and emergence into new territory. The software agents in Omnia Ex Natura build on a model I began working with in the early 2000s: simple computational entities that act according to defined behaviors, respond to one another and their environment, and collectively produce emergent forms.

This exhibition is curated by Sabine Himmelsbach.

artport: A History of Internet Art @ Whitney Museum of American Art

My 2004 project {Software} Structures will be exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in artport: A History of Internet Art, opening November 21, 2026.

artport: A History of Internet Art marks the 25th anniversary of artport, the Whitney’s online gallery space for commissions of net art, which launched in 2001. Since its inception, artport has presented a snapshot of the varied practices artists use to engage with an ever-evolving online environment. Taking place online and in the gallery, the exhibition tells a history of the evolution of net art over a quarter century and features more than 100 works commissioned specifically for artport.

This exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art, with David Lisbon, Curatorial Assistant, and Colin Brooks, Head of Digital Development.

Computational Art BA Degree @ UCLA

After years of work, I’m thrilled to announce our new Computational Art BA degree at UCLA has been fully approved. Applications for fall 2027 are due December 15.

Computational Art at UCLA is for students who want to make creative work with code, systems, data, interaction, and emerging technologies. Students work across art, design, and media, but computation is at the center of the major, serving not simply as a tool, but as a creative material, a way of thinking, and a subject for artistic exploration.

The Department of Design Media Arts, where I’ve taught since 2003, is launching three new majors this year: Computational Art, Design, and Games. Please help us spread the word and share with any high school students who might be interested in applying now or in the future.

SOURCE: Generative Art Lecture Series

Last winter, UCLA Social Software started the SOURCE lecture series in collaboration with the Generative Art Foundation. We invited three artists to share their stories: how they began working with generative art, the projects that defined their practices, and what they’re exploring now. Each lecture was followed by a 15-minute Q&A with the host. We’re posting the lectures to the Social Software YouTube channel. So far, we have hosted Operator (Ania Catherine and Dejha Ti), Mitchell F. Chan, and Martin Grasser.

Thank you for tuning in. I hope to see you down the road in 2026.

++_++ Casey

Saturday, June 13th
12–2pm
@ Fuser, 1811 Blake Ave, Los Angeles

Celebrate the closing of Social Software Cycle 2 with us. We invite you to join us for final performances and presentations by the cohort members. Please RSVP at https://luma.com/b74p5vlk

Over the last ten weeks, SoSoft cohort members have developed projects that reinterpret “scores for social software.”

Jordan Silver — Sonic Architecture
Em Lugo — Ambling Los Angeles
Æther Cavendish — Vigil Score
Thomas Noya — Biophonía
Mavyn Vu — the radio is an altar : portal
Alex Espinosa — Music for World Computers
Jeffrey Alan Scudder — Aesthetic.Computer
Darlyn Phan — Meridians
Chelly Jin — Software as a Choreography
Banyi Huang — Conjuring Notness

We understand a score as a way of choreographing events in time through text, diagrams, or other forms of instruction. We understand social software as any system that organizes behavior, coordinates people, or structures interaction.

Scores for Social Software builds on the tradition of Fluxus scores, books like Notations (eds. John Cage and Allison Knowles) and the do it anthologies (ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist). We’ll explore the research of the recent The Scores Project (eds. Gallope, Harren, Hicks). Our aim is not only to learn from these histories, but to extend them—testing what a score can be in the context of contemporary technological, social, and institutional systems.

More on Social Software!

Full Video on YouTube

Introduction and NFTs — 00:00:04
I’m Casey Reas. I’m an artist. I work with code and images. I’m a generative artist. When I started doing this work around 2001, about 25 years ago, it was a very vibrant but very small community. It’s always been international, with people sharing work online and through the web, but typically there were only a few people in each region who were deeply engaged. Since 2021, there are now tens of thousands of people who are active and engaged. Seeing so many younger people with strong ideas and energy enter generative art has been the most vibrant development. When NFTs entered the picture—I became engaged around 2020—many of the early practitioners, people who had been working in this space 20 years ago, returned. That was exciting. At the same time, many new people came in. What I love is how different paths converge: some come from engineering and computer science toward art, others from art toward coding. These perspectives meet, generating ideas about visual systems, images, and simulation. Over the last five years, it’s been about sharing and new directions emerging. It’s been incredibly exciting.

Processing, Coding and Art — 00:01:27
I think coding and the arts have always gone hand in hand. Before artists used computers, they were already thinking in systems and algorithms—this goes back hundreds of years. More specifically, it’s been about 60 years since artists began writing code and building these systems. Traditionally, programming is taught through math or language. Around 2001, we created a new programming environment called Processing to bring these powerful ways of thinking into the visual arts. Instead of working with numbers and math, students make images from the first day you write code. We found this aligned naturally with how artists think and gave them access to the medium of code.

On Teaching — 00:02:29
Because technology changes so quickly, I focus on teaching fundamentals—ideas that have been around for decades. Once you understand those, you can learn new technologies with depth and speed. That’s the focus of my teaching. Teaching doesn’t keep me on the forefront of technology, but it keeps me engaged with ideas. Working with graduate students in the MFA program at UCLA and with undergraduates brings in new perspectives on what code and generative art can be. When you’ve been in the field a long time, you develop assumptions about its boundaries. People new to it move in unexpected directions—they push and stretch those boundaries. It’s the ideas, more than the technology, that matter.

Art and Experience — 00:03:54
I think the best art is subjective. Different people can come to an artwork and have different experiences. Many assume representational work—figures or landscapes—is better suited to emotional expression, but abstract works, including those made with code, can have the same effect. It depends on a certain openness. Generative art can be deeply emotional; it comes down to the viewer’s experience.
Different forms of art affect us in different ways. Sound-based and image-based works operate differently. Mark Rothko is a good example—if you spend time with one of his paintings, letting it wash over you, it can be a powerful emotional experience.

Coding is Writing — 00:05:19
I think of code as a form of writing. With language, we can write legal briefs, poems, novels—it’s a flexible medium for expression. Code is similar. It can produce work that feels cold or work that feels overwhelmingly sensual. It depends on what the artist brings to it. The medium itself supports a wide range of expressions.

Cycles of Energy — 00:05:45
From an artist’s perspective, I’ve seen several booms and busts. In the 1960s, there was a surge of interest in cybernetic art and art-and-technology, which later declined. Another surge came with the web in the late 1990s and early 2000s, followed by a quieter period. We’ve just experienced another surge. These moments change things permanently. As an artist, you stay committed to what matters to you. Whether or not there’s institutional attention or collecting, the work continues. And when energy returns—as it likely will—we’ll be ready.

Feral File — 00:07:25
We started Feral File in 2020 as a different approach to generative art. We began with group exhibitions, each led by a curator who brings in artists and develops a shared vision. Curators mentor artists, helping shape exhibitions and fostering growth. This model has created meaningful experiences for artists. We later added solo exhibitions, but group shows remain central. As an artist, working closely with a curator and forming a community with other artists is a powerful experience.

Marfa and Art Blocks Weekend — 00:06:52
Being here in Marfa means a lot. After working in this field for decades, what happened in 2021 was life-changing for many artists. It was a period of growth, but also a deeply social moment. It’s about the work, but also about the people. Being in Marfa represents that community coming together. There’s a shared energy, an infectious feeling that we’re doing this together. It’s a special time and place.

Collecting in public begins with the recognition that ownership leaves a networked artwork in the public sphere. The work remains accessible through the web, available to anyone with a connection. Provenance is transparent, transfers are traceable, and display extends beyond any single physical site. The act of collecting becomes visible participation in a shared system.

Collecting in public means honoring a broader framework of rights to display, to archive, and to steward. A collector assumes responsibility for continuity. Care extends beyond the token to the living system that allows the work to function.

Visibility is part of that responsibility. To display openly, to lend, to support exhibitions, and to contribute to discourse are ways of exercising the right to display in public. Collectors become nodes in a distributed cultural network, amplifying access. Their participation strengthens the ecosystem that sustains the work.

Maintenance is another dimension of collecting in public. Networked works depend on evolving standards, distributed storage systems such as IPFS and Arweave, servers, documentation, and conservation strategies. Stewardship includes redundancy, migration, and technical care as infrastructure shifts. Collecting becomes an ongoing practice.

Advocacy completes the role. Collectors influence cultural memory and institutions through their choices and commitments. By prioritizing openness, continuity, and responsible care, they help shape norms for the field. Collecting, practiced publicly and conscientiously, provides structural support for networked public art.

NFTs altered the conditions under which digital art could circulate and be collected. For decades prior, artists working with software, generative systems, and networked media had limited options. Digital works could be exhibited, commissioned, licensed, or freely distributed online, but they rarely functioned as collectible objects in a way comparable to a painting or sculpture. Collecting digital art often required translating it into something physical in order to adapt it to the conventions of the gallery system.

NFT infrastructure changed that dynamic; it introduced a widely adopted mechanism for recording and transferring property rights in a digital work without requiring a physical surrogate. Ownership could be transferred and verified on a distributed ledger while the file itself remained accessible. For the first time at scale, digital art could remain native to the network while operating within a recognizable framework of property rights.

The effects were transformative, and practices that had long existed at the margins — especially generative art — found a compatible economic structure. Artists who build systems capable of producing thousands of outputs could release those outputs individually while preserving authorship and provenance. Code was no longer simply a tool behind the image; it became central to the collectible object. Platforms emerged that treated algorithmic variation as a feature rather than a complication. This alignment between generative processes and blockchain registration was not incidental; both operate through rule-based systems that produce verifiable states.

The rapid expansion of the market, however, blurred these structural innovations with speculation. Prices escalated quickly. A large number of new participants entered the space, many motivated primarily by financial opportunity rather than sustained engagement with digital art. When the market contracted, it exposed the instability of models built primarily on velocity and short-term price appreciation.

From the perspective of 2026, the boom and contraction appear less as a verdict on NFTs and more as a familiar market cycle layered onto a genuine technological shift. The speculative excess was loud, but it was not the core innovation. What remains significant is the normalization of digital ownership rights. People now understand that a digital artwork can be uniquely owned, that its provenance can be publicly recorded, and that transfer can occur without physical exchange. That conceptual shift cannot be undone by market correction.

The present challenge is not to revive the intensity of 2021, but to design structures that are durable. Digital art does not need dramatic growth to justify itself; it needs stable systems that support artists and collectors over time. This involves rethinking platform design, royalty enforcement, storage standards, display technologies, and curatorial frameworks. It also requires developing literacy around digital media as a medium with its own formal concerns, rather than treating blockchain registration as a financial overlay.

Generative art continues to demonstrate why this infrastructure matters. A generative system can produce works at multiple scales: a single output, a small edition, or a large series released over time. Each output can be registered and transferred without altering the visual experience of the work. The absence of a materially privileged original allows for new relationships between uniqueness and repetition. This was theoretically possible before NFTs, but it lacked a broadly accepted mechanism for assigning and transferring property rights. The blockchain did not invent generative art; it provided a practical framework for distributing it.

At the same time, the NFT cycle clarified limits. Artificial scarcity without conceptual grounding does not sustain long-term engagement. Projects that relied solely on engineered rarity or rapid turnover have largely faded. What persists are artists and communities committed to the medium itself — to code, systems, and the aesthetics of computation.

The traditional gallery system is also evolving, but it has not disappeared, nor should it. Physical works and controlled installations remain vital. What has changed is that a parallel ecology now exists in which digital works can circulate as rights-bearing objects without abandoning their native form. This ecology is still uneven and fragmented, but it is real.

The task now is to build with greater intentionality. That means supporting interoperability rather than siloed platforms, encouraging thoughtful collecting rather than speculative flipping, and recognizing digital preservation as an ongoing responsibility. It also means accepting that digital art will not replicate the structures of the twentieth-century art market. Its strengths lie elsewhere — in scale, in programmability, in transparency of provenance, and in the ability to operate globally from the moment of release.

NFTs did not resolve the economic precarity of artists, nor did they democratize collecting in any simple way. What they did was make visible a model in which digital media can function as rights-bearing objects without ceasing to be shareable information. The first phase of that experiment was volatile. The next phase will depend less on exuberance and more on care: careful platform design, careful curation, and careful cultivation of audiences who value digital art not because it is new, but because it is structurally and aesthetically distinct.

The question of whether to describe the current wave of work as “NFTs” or “digital art” is not merely semantic. It reveals deeper assumptions about medium, distribution, history, and value.

In her book Digital Art, Christiane Paul outlines digital art as an expansive field that encompasses works created, stored, and presented through digital technologies. The term includes generative systems, net art, interactive installations, software art, virtual and augmented reality, data visualization, AI-driven work, and more. Digital art is not defined by a single tool or platform; it is defined by the use of computation as material, context, or condition. It is a broad category that stretches across decades, institutions, and forms.

By contrast, “NFT” refers to a specific technological mechanism: the non-fungible token, a record on a blockchain that verifies ownership of a unique digital asset. NFTs emerged in 2017 with projects such as CryptoKitties and gained massive cultural and market momentum in 2021 through platforms like Art Blocks and high-profile sales at Christie’s. The acronym quickly became shorthand for a speculative market boom, celebrity endorsements, and eye-watering auction results. Just as quickly, the term fell into disfavor, burdened by associations with hype cycles, environmental critiques, and financial volatility.

The key distinction is that NFTs describe a distribution and ownership mechanism, not an artistic medium. An NFT can point to a generative artwork, a static image, a video, a sound file, or even a tweet. The aesthetic and conceptual substance of the work exists independently of the token. The blockchain provides a way to register provenance, scarcity, and transfer; it does not define the visual language, conceptual framework, or experiential structure of the piece. To call something “NFT art” is therefore to foreground its method of circulation rather than its artistic lineage.

Digital art, on the other hand, situates contemporary practices within a longer history. In the 1960s, artists working with mainframes and plotters used the term “computer art” to describe experiments by figures such as Frieder Nake and Vera Molnár. Over time, as computation permeated everyday life, “computer art” expanded into “digital art,” reflecting the ubiquity and diversity of digital technologies. Today’s blockchain-registered generative works are part of that continuum. They extend conversations about algorithms, randomness, authorship, and systems that have been unfolding for more than half a century.

The naming debate, then, is about emphasis. “NFT” highlights infrastructure: smart contracts, decentralized ledgers, peer-to-peer exchange. “Digital art” highlights medium and method: code as material, data as pigment, networks as site. NFTs and blockchains are related technologies; they provide a framework for recording ownership and enabling new economic relationships between artists and collectors. But they do not encompass the full range of digital practices, nor do they define their meaning.

If the goal is to describe the artistic activity happening right now in a historically grounded way, “digital art” remains the more accurate and inclusive term. NFTs are one chapter—an important and transformative one—in the ongoing story of art made with and through computation.

If you’d like to receive infrequent updates—notes on work, research, teaching, and exhibitions—you can subscribe here:

@REAS

REAS Studio and co-director of UCLA Social Software. Co-founder of Feral File, Processing Foundation, and Processing

I’ll figure out the tone and length of these as I go, so here’s the first iteration:

At the start of 2026, I’m wrapping up a new exhibition opening in early March in collaboration with Feral File and Art Blocks. Last year, I premiered new work with bitforms and with DAM Projects. I’m currently teaching my Generative Art course at UCLA and developing a new working group through Social Software. More details on these and other projects below!

Ex Nihilo (Cosmos)

Ex Nihilo (Cosmos) is the most recent work in the Still Life series. It extends the project’s engagement with the five Platonic solids, but pushes further into decomposition. This new exhibition features a generative artwork in a series of 256 instances and five new drawings. The work will be released in early March simultaneously on Art Blocks and Feral File. The title references the generative condition of computer graphics: images emerging ex nihilo—from code rather than from physical materials. The work continues my interest in how classical metaphysics persists inside contemporary computational systems. The work is contextualized with a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist and an amazing new text by Zsofi Valyi-Nagy. The text from Zsofi articulates things that I haven’t been able to communicate well myself. I’m excited for you to read her lucid thoughts about the work.

Feral File’s FF1 and FFP

I co-founded Feral File in 2020. Over the past five years, we’ve organized 50 exhibitions, working with more than 266 artists and 40 curators. Last year we moved in an unexpected direction: designing hardware to support individuals and institutions in showing digital art. The FF1 Art Computer and the FFP Panel together form the Feral File Digital Art System—a modular setup designed specifically for presenting software-based work. I wrote and shared a short text about my first experience with FF1.

New REAS.com

After many years of incremental updates, I’ve rebuilt REAS.com from the ground up. The new structure clarifies the relationships between individual works, series, and larger categories. It reflects how I now think about the work as overlapping systems—Process, Atomism, In Silico, ULTRACONCENTRATED, and others. It’s less a portfolio and more of a map. The new site is augmented by the INDEX, a complete catalog of everything I’ve released since 2000.

In Silico @ Gradient Canopy

Along with other artists working with machine learning—Refik Anadol, Linda Dounia Rebeiz, Michael Joo, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Rashaad Newsome, Sara Rosalena, Sasha Stiles, Trevor Paglen, Certain Measures, and Clement Valla—I received a commission to create new work for the Gradient Canopy building, a home for Google’s AI research.

For the project, I developed a new dataset and trained a model across three scales: microscope images of California native plants, high-resolution scans of those same specimens, and satellite images of the landscapes where they grow. The work extends my ongoing interest in machine learning and nineteenth-century chemical photography—bridging two distinct moments in the history of technical images.

The team produced a one-minute video to show the process behind the project. Related work in this series was featured in the November 2025 issue of Artforum with an introductory text and portfolio. More on the series at REAS.com.

Zero One @ Art Basel Miami

New work from In Silico was presented in the inaugural Zero One section at Art Basel Miami Beach last December with bitforms, in dialogue with selections from Manfred Mohr and Maya Man. The context was meaningful, placing my recent machine learning works within other generations of computational practices represented by Manfred and Maya’s work.

In collaboration with Erika Weitz, I produced two new analog chemical photographs in the Technical Image series. These works extend the ongoing translation between dataset, software system, and material surface.

Earthly Delights 4.2 premiered as well. This iteration moves in a slower, more ambient direction. It draws from the IS-2 dataset originally developed for the Gradient Canopy commission, continuing the series’ exploration of synthetic botanical space through generative variation.

Layer Canvas

My work in Zero One with bitforms was presented on a Layer Canvas, a new initiative from Angelo Sotira. I created two new artworks for the Canvas system (Process 21 and Network F) and licensed another (Still Life (HSB E)). It’s the highest-quality hardware and display I’ve seen for digital art. I did an interview with them and I’m happy to share it with you.

Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF)

I’m part of the 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship program, with my site visits taking place in 2026. I’ll spend time in the archives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in March and at Cooper Hewitt this summer, looking closely at how artists use scores, diagrams, and notation within their process and work. The project began as Rewilding – New Performance Scores. It has since migrated into Scores for Social Software—a shift in emphasis, but grounded in the same archival research.

OPEN CALL: Scores for Social Software, Cycle 2

Social Software is launching an OPEN CALL for the Cycle 2 working group. We’re inviting artists, designers, and researchers to propose new Scores for Social Software—works that define conditions for interaction. These may take the form of text, diagrams, instructions, software, or hybrid structures.

Scores for Social Software builds on the tradition of Fluxus scores, books like Notations (eds. John Cage and Allison Knowles), and the do it anthologies (ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist). We’ll explore the research of the recent compilation The Scores Project (eds. Gallope, Harren, Hicks). Our aim is not only to learn from these histories, but to extend them—testing what a score can be in the context of contemporary technological, social, and institutional systems.

New Classes @ UCLA: Art and the Internet, Generative Art

I’m a lifer at UCLA. I’ve been there since 2003, and it’s deeply woven into both my life and my work. As co-chair of the Department of Design Media Arts Curriculum Committee and Vice-Chair of the department, I’ve been part of a major restructuring over the past few years. We expanded the MFA in Media Art from two to three years and reworked the BA curriculum. Last year I added two new courses: Art and the Internet and Generative Art. Generative Art brings my teaching into even closer alignment with my studio practice.

This first newsletter got a little out of hand and longer than I expected. Thank you for tuning in and your interest. I hope to see you in 2026.

+++++ Casey

Museums are reassessing the role of computation in modern and contemporary art, mounting large-scale exhibitions that trace its origins, expand its canon, and situate digital practice within broader cultural histories. From early algorithmic experiments to immersive pre-internet environments and contemporary generative systems, these shows reveal how artists have long engaged technology not simply as a tool, but as a conceptual framework. They signal an institutional recognition that software, systems, and networks are central to understanding the visual culture of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Sep 28, 2018–Apr 14, 2019
Curated by Christiane Paul with Carol Mancusi-Ungaro
Website

“Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965–2018 establishes connections between works of art based on instructions, spanning over fifty years of conceptual, video, and computational art. The pieces in the exhibition are all “programmed” using instructions, sets of rules, and code, but they also address the use of programming in their creation. The exhibition links two strands of artistic exploration: the first examines the program as instructions, rules, and algorithms with a focus on conceptual art practices and their emphasis on ideas as the driving force behind the art; the second strand engages with the use of instructions and algorithms to manipulate the TV program, its apparatus, and signals or image sequences.”

Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Feb 12–Jul 2, 2023
Curated by Leslie Jones
Website

“Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952–1982 explores how the rise of computer technology, together with its emergence in popular consciousness, impacted the making of art in the age of the mainframe. International and interdisciplinary in scope, Coded examines the origins of what we now call digital art, featuring artists, writers, musicians, choreographers, and filmmakers working directly with computers as well as those using algorithms and other systems to produce their work. Whether computer-generated or not, the many artworks considered here reflect the simultaneous wonder and alienation that was characteristic of the 1960s and ’70s, along with the utopian and dystopian possibilities of these new machines. Today, with digital technology having been fully integrated into our lives, Coded’s examination of the years leading up to the advent of the personal computer is relevant, even imperative, to fully appreciating art and culture in the age of the computer—both then and now.”

Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Nov 24, 2024–Jul 13, 2025
Curated by Britt Salvesen and Staci Steinberger
Website

“Over the last four decades, image-editing software has radically transformed our visual world. The ease with which images and text can be digitally generated and altered has enabled new forms of creative experimentation, while also sparking philosophical debates about the very nature of representation. Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film examines the impact of digital manipulation tools from the 1980s to the present, for the first time assessing simultaneous developments and debates in the fields of photography, graphic design, and visual effects. Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition traces the emergence of distinctive digital aesthetic strategies, relationships to realism, and storytelling modes. The nearly 200 artists, designers, and makers in Digital Witness illuminate today’s visual culture where digital editing tools are easier to access than ever before.”

Electric Op

Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Sep 27, 2024–Jan 27, 2025
Curated by Tina Rivers Ryan
Website

“Bringing together more than ninety works spanning six decades, Electric Op examines how artists have used abstraction to explore the relationship between perception and technology. While today considered an art historical “dead end” with few echoes in contemporary art, Op art in fact became the first artistic movement of the Information Age, paving the way for art to be abstracted into analog and digital circuits. Just as optical illusions help us “see” ourselves in the act of seeing, Op art can help us see how vision itself has been transformed by electronic media.”

Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms

Toledo Museum of Art
Jul 12–Nov 30, 2025
Curated by Julia Kaganskiy
Website

“Artists have long used instructions and rule-based systems to produce their work, from thirteenth century Islamic geometric tiles to twentieth century avant-garde movements. Infinite Images: The Art of Algorithms reveals how some contemporary artists use mathematical principles, chance, and automation to design and work with generative systems. In generative art, the artist creates a system to produce the artwork—perhaps written instructions for others to follow or a computer program. In the process they give up some control over the end result. The artist creates the rules, and the system generates the outcomes. This approach, whether analog or digital, enables the artist to experiment with multiple variations within a set of defined constraints, often yielding unexpected results.”

Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991

Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
Feb 28–May 25, 2025
Curated by Michelle Cotton
Website

“Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991 examines the pioneering role of women in digital art. Comprising more than one hundred works by fifty artists, the exhibition includes painting, sculpture, installation, film, performance and many computer-generated drawings and texts. Focusing on women who were among the first to use the computer – mainframe and minicomputers – as a tool for art making. They are accompanied by other artists who made the computer their subject or worked in a computational way with algorithmic or mathematically based systems. The exhibition begins with works made in academic or industrial computer labs and ends with others made on the first personal computers in the last years before the World Wide Web made the internet publicly accessible. Set within a period that was also marked by the second wave of feminism, it documents a lesser-known history of the inception of digital art, countering conventional narratives on art and technology by focusing entirely on female figures.”

Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet

Tate Modern, London
Nov 28, 2024–Jun 1, 2025
Curated by Val Ravaglia
Website

“From the birth of op art to the dawn of the internet age, artists found new ways to engage the senses and play with our perception. Electric Dreams celebrates the early innovators of optical, kinetic, programmed and digital art, who pioneered a new era of immersive sensory installations and automatically-generated works. This major exhibition brings together groundbreaking works by a wide range of international artists who engaged with science, technology and material innovation. Experience the psychedelic environments they created in the 1950s and 60s, built using mathematical principles, motorised components and new industrial processes. See how radical artists embraced the birth of digital technology in the 1970s and 1980s, experimenting with machine-made art and early home computing systems.”