Conjured Terrain
A Casey REAS Solo Exhibition

Conjured Terrain presented new work from Casey REAS's ongoing Untitled Film Stills (UFS) project, alongside videos from the related body of work Compressed Cinema. The exhibition was framed as a call-and-response with DAM Projects in Berlin, and all work was shown at Vellum LA on Luma Canvas LED displays. The soundtrack is by Jan St. Werner.

REAS is a pillar of the Los Angeles art community and one of the most influential new media artists working today. His work stands apart from popular narratives about art made with code, especially the hype around AI image generators trained on vast datasets to produce plausible imagery on prompt. With Untitled Film Stills, REAS engages machine learning as a material, not to produce a functional image quickly, but to examine imagery's ability to contain and convey realities.

“Each Untitled Film Still image is a frame from an imagined film,” REAS says. “The idea is to reveal another reality within the original film, something that has the character of the original work, but is transformed into something else. A film is a perspective from which to view the world, and a set of Untitled Film Still images are a unique view of the original film that produces a new and alternate reality in an unexpected way.”

The process begins with the artist selecting a film, which is converted into hundreds of thousands of individual frames, 24 for each second of the original. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is trained on those frames and learns to generate imagery in the style of the film. Like shooting a film, this takes about a month. REAS then generates thousands of new images from the model, sometimes passing them through a second model to change their visual tone. These synthesized images become his raw footage. He selects and sequences them, then moves into post-production, where he resizes and color grades them.

The work involves real technical rigor, but more than that it depends on the artist's intuition about which images express an idea that can't be expressed any other way. The works stand alone as discrete objects while remaining in dialogue with the processes and inputs behind them. Though the models can produce high-fidelity photographic images, that was never the intention.

“Each Untitled Film Still is an uncanny picture from a dream; it is evocative of the history of oneiric cinema,” REAS says. “The images oscillate between representation and abstraction; they require interpretation to make meaning.”

The two-part structure of the exhibition echoed how the artist conceives of the work. At DAM Projects, which opened in September, a different grouping of Untitled Film Stills was shown as prints on paper. At Vellum LA, the works were shown on LED displays. Each Untitled Film Still is the sum of its physical and digital expressions, and each was issued as a 1/1 pairing a print and a digital work.

About Casey REAS

Casey REAS's software, prints, and installations have been featured in solo and group exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Asia. His work ranges from small works on paper to urban-scale installations. It is held in private and public collections including the Centre Georges Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. REAS is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. With Ben Fry, he initiated Processing in 2001, an open-source programming language and environment for the visual arts.

About Jan St. Werner

Jan St. Werner is an electronic music composer and artist based in Berlin, best known as one half of the duo Mouse on Mars. He has also released solo work under his own name and as Lithops, Noisemashinetapes, and Neuter River, beginning in the mid-1990s as part of Cologne's A-Musik collective. He was artistic director of Amsterdam's Institute for Electronic Music (STEIM) and in 2013 launched the Fiepblatter Catalogue on Thrill Jockey Records. He has been a visiting lecturer in the Art, Culture and Technology program at MIT and is a professor for Interactive Media and Dynamic Acoustic Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg.