Digital Media Dish

Software Structures by Casey Reas

http://artport.whitney.org/commissions/softwarestructures/

Casey Reas (b. 1972) is a Californian born digital artists who currently works and lives in Los Angeles, California. There, Reas works as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Reas received his masters degree in Media Arts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his bachelor’s degree in Art at the University of Cincinnati. In 2001, Reas collaborated with Ben Fry to publish a program for digital artists that is an open source for programming languages, as well as an environment for creating images, and animations. His piece Software Structures (2004) is part of a larger collection that explores the relationship between naturally occurring systems and those artificial ones. His attempt is to compare the similarity to the human systems, but also to signify the quantitative bounds which these systems have.

Upon first viewing the animation, it appears that the lines in the piece move at a random momentum, and in no defined path. However, after viewing the piece for an elapsed period of time, it appears that they have specifically programmed and repeated movements that one is able to predict. The beauty of this piece though, is that Reas did multiple works, which are both similar and different to one another to form the same line structure (when one disregards the shadows). I find this to be a metaphor to how people view human life. In the end we are all, pretty much, cells, and there is no arguing that. However, at the same time, no two people are the same in beliefs, attitudes, ideas, intelligence, etc… So, while we all may be made up of the same basic elemental structure, we all view the structure in different ways. Reas shows this through the different animation of Software Structures, when he adds shadows to some, but gives them each the same ultimate resting point.

My only critique of this piece was the immense leap (and honestly I was pushed) I had to make to relate this to human life. I understood from the title that “Structure” implied genetic structure, but I had to read the description of the piece to understand the symbolism Reas was going for. I think if he juxtaposed a DNA molecule or something to that nature, then it would have been clearer and easier to understand the message that Reas was attempting to convey.

Overall, I think this is a profound piece, and I would be quite interested to see what else he can do with his and Fry’s program.