Inaugural Exhibition at bitforms: Casey Reas’s first commercial gallery showing

This show is the first for the newly opened gallery, bitforms, which would help to reintroduce the fine art world to technology and art at the turn of the millennium.

Founded by Steve Sacks, bitforms opened its doors in 2001 with Inaugural Exhibition. The new Chelsea gallery aimed to “celebrate the nexus of art and technology,” serving as "a forum to display digital and digitally inspired art.”

The opening of bitforms in 2001, combined with the release of Processing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry to reinvigorate code-based art.

Inaugural Exhibition featured Casey Reas along with Golan Levin, Dorothy Krause and four others. Reas’s displayed work, Path series, would go on to become Tissue, exhibited as software the following year at bitforms and in 2021 as Phototaxis on Art Blocks. Path and Tissue can even be seen as primitive-AI work. Reas himself explains in Medium:

“Late in my time studying Media Arts and Sciences as a graduate student at MIT, I found my way into an Artificial Intelligence class taught by Rodney Brooks. In that class, I was introduced to the book Vehicles written by the neuroanatomist Valentino Braitenberg. The ideas in this short but profound book were the origin for the Path and Tissue prints that I created 2001–03. Braitenberg’s “vehicles” are minimal, simulated bodies that have behaviors similar to living organisms. Through writing code, I interpreted these organisms as software machines for drawing.”

Beyond the Reas and Levin show, a year later, Manfred Mohr would open the first of his several solo shows at bitforms. It featured works spanning the first three decades of the digital generative art pioneer’s career.

Bitforms continues to showcase the depth and breadth of contemporary, digitally inspired art. It has exhibited pieces spanning from the hand-woven linen textiles of Beryl Korot to works utilizing quantum computing by Refik Anadol.

In the 22 years since Inaugural Exhibition, bitforms has provided a critical space for the intersection of art and technology to flourish. It has continued a decades-long tradition to which New York has contributed so much.