In Coversation with Casey Reas

Can you tell us about the idea behind the exhibition and what people can expect?

The exhibition is two things. It’s most importantly the start of something new, and it’s also a documentation of ideas that I’ve been working with for a very long time.

I created a body of work called the Process Series from 2004 to 2010, and during those six years I explored a lot of ideas around emergence in natural systems, using software not as a way of simulating nature, but as a way of growing form inspired by how nature operates.

For the last few years, I’ve been very excited about returning to that work, moving it forward and pushing it in new directions. Instead of making this a contained exhibition, the idea is to think of it as being in residence, or having a studio at virtual.hek.ch.

The exhibition includes documentation of earlier work, with images, videos and links to publications, but the primary idea is that every week I’ll create a new sketch for this emerging body of work. Each one begins with a small watercolor painting that I’ll make live on virtual.hek.ch. That painting then becomes a visual score for software that gets created later.

So the space isn’t simply an archive of things that have already been done, but a site for the creation of new work. That’s the in situ part. The exhibition will keep developing from week to week, and I genuinely don’t know what we’re going to be seeing two months from now.

What happens during the live sessions?

I’ll be making very intuitive, fluid watercolor paintings and hopefully chatting with people who come by and being in dialogue around the work. I’m planning to have an overhead camera focused on where I’m making the sketches, so that’s where a lot of the activity and energy will be happening during the sessions.

I’ve never done anything like this before, and I’m excited to see what it may yield. The more traditional way of working for me is to be in the studio for a couple of years, then have an opening and talk about the work. I’m really interested in inverting that and being in conversation about the work while it’s being created.

You mentioned that the watercolor paintings become “scores” for the software. How does that work?

The paintings become a way of defining the environment that the software operates within. The marks that I’m making with my hand become part of the structure for what happens next.

When I made the earlier Process Series, I was working with text as a score, very much in the tradition of artists like Sol LeWitt and Fluxus artists. What I’ve been researching over the last year is visual scores, diagrams and notation systems. So this new work is moving from text scores to visual scores. I create a series of behaviors for small software agents and put them together in a simulated or virtual environment. They follow those behaviors, and the form flows out of those independent elements interacting with one another. What I’m excited about is making that bridge between something I’m doing directly with my hand and what happens later in the software.

Casey Reas, Process Compendium (X-5), 2026. Courtesy of the artist.

You use the term “emergence” when talking about the work. What does this mean to you?

I’ve been struggling with that for over 30 years! For me, emergence means that things happen that aren’t encoded or described in the individual elements. I make the rules and create the software agents, but once they’re made, they do their own thing independently from my will or intention. The way they interact with each other creates secondary behaviors that I am not the author of or in control of.

There are two terms I use to think about this. One is autographic: writing with my hands, writing with my body, creating in a direct way. The other is allographic: writing with something other than yourself.

I think of software as an allographic writing process. It’s a process of composition where I compose the elements, but then the elements follow their own rules and behaviors. In this new work, the watercolor brings that direct, autographic process together with what happens later in the software.

Casey Reas, Process 6 (image 4), 2005. Courtesy of the artist.

Can you tell us about the title, Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ?

Omnia Ex Natura: In Situ means “Everything from Nature Onsite.”

In coming back to this biology-inspired work, I wanted to take the language of biology, the way Latin is used to create taxonomies and nomenclature to classify the natural world, and use that as a framework.

When I made the first Process Series, everything was numbered: Process 4, Process 5, Process 6. I’m of the opinion now that that was too rigid.

What I like about using this Latinized structure from biology is that things can be more gnarly, more rhizomatic and less linear, because the work is anything but linear.

Stones in Casey Reas’ Studio. Courtesy of the artist.

Nature is an important reference point in the work. What does that mean to you, and where does that inspiration come from?

For me, the work is not really about a visual abstraction of nature, but more about a functional abstraction of nature: how things operate, how things work at a cellular level rather than at our level of perception.

That interest is also very personal. Being in nature, hiking, sitting, just spending time outside has always been an essential part of my life. I grew up in a somewhat rural area in the United States, always camping, always being outside, and I’ve always felt a very strong affinity with the natural world.

I would say my two greatest influences are other art and direct observation: spending time in museums, looking at things, reading and watching things, but also observing the world directly. I have a collection of acorns and a huge collection of rocks. They’re everywhere, on every shelf in my studio.

“Life is not binary. That’s why I’m hesitant to call this ‘alive.’ There’s no clear line, as much as we would love it to be.”
—Kate Adamala, Synthetic Biologist

The exhibition begins with Kate Adamala’s idea that life isn’t binary, that there isn’t a clear line between what is alive and what isn’t. What makes Casey Reas feel alive?

Having experiences, sensing the world. Going running in the morning, going for a hike, sitting and meditating, touching another person, having a conversation with my children. Just these kinds of sensory experiences.

For me, a lot of being an artist is being in touch with those experiences. The work that I make is largely about creating and constructing aesthetic experiences for myself and for other people.

At HEK in the education program we often work with coding as a creative tool. You co-founded Processing and have also been teaching code to young artists and designers for many years. With AI-assisted and prompt-based coding becoming increasingly common, do you think people should still learn how to code?

My thoughts around this are changing day by day and week by week, but I’m feeling very positive about it. I’ve been teaching code to young artists and designers at UCLA for 20 years, and prompt-based coding has completely changed the classroom environment. I see it as another way of learning.

I believe that coding is non-technical. I believe that coding is a way of thinking. Learning that way of thinking is the whole point. LLMs can remove the opportunity to learn if you simply say, “Make this thing.” But they can also help you go deeper: they can explain something, simplify it, break it down and explain it again in a different way.

So yes, I believe people still need to learn to code. But how deeply they need to learn depends on what they want to make and where their ideas need to go.

Any final words?

Come to the opening and join the live sessions! Hopefully it’ll be a lively, fun time. I’m really interested in being in conversation about the work while it’s happening, rather than only talking about it once it’s finished. That’s a critical part of this experiment, so I really hope people will join when they can.

Join us for the online opening on Friday, 28 August 2026 at 18:00 CEST on virtual.hek.ch.

You can also follow the exhibition as it unfolds and join Casey Reas for one of his live studio sessions:

SKETCH #002 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
04.09.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #003 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
11.09.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #004 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
18.09.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #005 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
25.09.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #006 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
02.10.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #007 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
09.10.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #008 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
16.10.2026, 18:00 CEST

SKETCH #009 — Live Studio Session with Casey Reas
23.10.2026, 18:00 CEST