Omnia Ex Natura Ends Casey Reas's Online HEK Residency
The Processing co-founder turns a weekly watercolor into a score for software agents, live, one last time before the show closes.
- When
- Final live studio session Fri., Oct. 23, 2026, 6 to 7 p.m. CEST (9 a.m. PT, noon ET). Exhibition online through Sun., Oct. 25
- Where
- Online at virtual.hek.ch, from HEK in Basel
- Cost
- Free
Casey Reas holds the last live studio session for Omnia Ex Natura, the work at the center of the artist's online exhibition and residency with HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel, on Friday. The show, which opened Aug. 28, closes Sunday. Reas announced the final session in an Instagram post inviting viewers into HEK's Common.Garden.
An excerpt from Casey Reas's Process 10 (2005 to 2010), from the Process Series that Omnia Ex Natura extends. Watch it on Vimeo via bitforms gallery.
The residency treats virtual.hek.ch as a remote studio. Every Friday, Reas paints a small watercolor and translates it into a score for a population of software agents, which then move through a synthetic environment in front of whoever is logged in. The agents follow a model Reas began in the early 2000s: simple computational entities with defined behaviors that respond to one another and to their surroundings, producing forms none of them is told to make. HEK frames the work as an extension of the artist's Process Series (2004 to 2010), pushed toward ecology and emergence. Friday's session is Sketch No. 9.
The exhibition takes its epigraph from synthetic biologist Kate Adamala: life is not binary, so there is no clean line for calling a system alive. Sabine Himmelsbach curated.
Reas co-founded Processing with Ben Fry in 2001, and the language's 25th year is crowding the calendar this month, from Processing Community Day in Dortmund to the Processing Foundation's new gaming track. The HEK sessions show the other half of that history: the artist painting by hand, then handing the picture to a swarm.
Frames from Process 10. Images: Casey Reas, via bitforms gallery.
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