C.E.B. Reas belongs to a young generation of artists exploring the potential of diverse digital media, especially software and code. Thematically, this exploration has led him to look at points of contact between these artifical means of creation and natural processes that lead to the emergence of living system. Taking inspiration from concepts of cybernetics and the natural sciences, Reas writes programs that not so much concretely determine entire structures as describe a set of abstract interactions or relations between thousands of elements. Once set in motion these abstractions manifest themselves in unpredictable ways: effects are created that can no longer be influenced or anticipated by the artist himself.

Reas’ aesthetics revolve around the ambiguity of the natural and the synthetic. His software-based installations, prints and animations are reminiscent of hybrid, otherwordly landscapes populated by plant or animal-like creatures that, when viewed at very small scales, prove to be made up of thousands of meticulously executed mechanical strokes. These rigorously detailed structures convey a sense of the complexity and abundance of processes and movements lying underneath the seemingly stable appearances of our visual world. Yet although his “controlled microworlds” simulate organic processes, “they have little relation to the world we live in, but reflect aspects of it”, the artist comments. “I strive to create works which exists outside of what I can imagine at the time of their creation.”

Drawing on Sol Lewitt’s conceptual strategies, Reas has adopted a very intuitive way of working with code which reduces the technical aspects of programming and emphasises its affinities with such immediate and fluid practices as painting and drawing. Before any attention is given to machine implementation, Reas develops a set of instructions (a text description and optional diagram) that outlines the visual structures to be executed. Each realisation of these instructions in different media, including machine code, computer animation, prints or installation, only illustrates a different aspect of the abstraction forming the final piece.

C.E.B. Reas has exhibited his work internationally in galleries and museums including, amongst other venues, [DAM] Berlin, Institute for Contemporary Art  (London), New Museum for Contemporary Art (New York), NTT ICC (Tokyo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Telic (Los Angeles), BANK (Los Angeles), the Danish Film Institute (Copenhagen), bitforms gallery (New York), Eyebeam (New York), CCCB (Barcelona), STUK (Leuven), The Dallas Contemporary, Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design (Oslo), and Kuenstlerhaus (Vienna). In 2005 he was commissioned to create a piece of work for the Whitney Museum's Artport.

In 2005 C.E.B. Reas was awarded the 2005 Golden Nica from Ars Electronica together with Ben Fry for Processing, a Java-based software initiated to suit the specific needs of software artists and designers and now used by an international community of practitioners.

C.E.B. Reas was a graduate student and researcher with John Maeda’s Aesthetics and Computation group at the notorious Massachusetts Institute of Technology media lab (I am not sure this is correct, since the German version is somewhat different). One of the founding professors of the Interaction Design Institute in Ivrea in Italy, Reas currently works at the department for Design |Media Arts at UCLA, Los Angeles.