Casey Reas’ Garden of Earthly Delights

Editor, author and professor Charlotte Kent surveys how Casey Reas is continuing the legacy of pioneering exploration into the natural world on a micro level, transforming data into art through photographic, cinematic and now digital imagery.

Casey Reas’ Garden of Earthly Delights
Charlotte Kent, PhD

The experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage emphasises in Metaphors on Vision (1963) that photography’s realism derives from a conventional illusion based on rules of perspective and composition, with lenses ground to reproduce that compositional perspective, all of which film commonly reiterated, thereby limiting the medium’s potential to an ideological fantasy. It was 1963, a time of increasing attention to the limitations of established visual structures. Brakhage calls upon artists to “leap the fence” of this picketed reality and scatter “hybrid seeds inspired by both the garden and wits-end forest where only fools and madmen wander, seeds needing several generations to be…finally proven edible.” Casey Reas brings us to that garden, in Wet and Saturated Process, one cultivated from the very biodome where Brakhage worked. 

In 2018, Reas foraged around the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Colorado, the same bio-region where Stan Brakhage had produced his experimental film, Mothlight (1963). Reas scanned the plants he found at high resolution, which became the data set for his own Garden of Earthly Delights (2018), inspired by Brakhage’s 1981 film by the same name. The frames from Reas’ experimental film became a new data set to move back and forth from the dark room to the computer for the works in Wet and Saturated Process. Collaborating with Erika Weitz, a photographer with extensive experience working with historical wet plate practices like cyanotypes and tin types, Reas connects computational efforts to a lineage of technical and ideologic concerns surrounding image (re)production. His use of Generative Adversarial Networks (a particular kind of AI) is detailed and specific, best described in his own words. The insights available in Reas’ careful body of work, however, is a garden of associations for anyone. 

Technical Images recalls the strange view of plant cells that I first encountered looking through a microscope for biology classes years ago; the works’ intimate size requires leaning closer to observe the magnifications produced digitally and then rendered through a wet plate collodion process. Exploring the sensitive material of early photography and collodion’s careful coaxing across coating and exposure allows an analogy to be drawn to the, often ignored, time consuming process of moving within the latent space of a GAN to find images whose relations speak to the artist. The complex vector configuration of latent space makes it a continuous environment, analog in that sense despite its seeming digital context, and its fluidity produces a kind of navigational sensorium for a computer artist not so different from the way a photographer gets a feel for the chemical bath or pours required in making a print. 

The collodion process advanced from cyanotypes, invented in 1842 by Sir John Herschel, but which Anna Atkins made famous with Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843). She thoughtfully arranged wet algae directly on the light-sensitised paper, uniting an interest in science and art, but which invites us to consider the lens that organic material, like algae or silver, paper or air quality, play in our appreciation of the world in which we live. So called blue-green algae (more accurately cyanobacteria) are responsible for releasing oxygen on the planet 3.5 billion years ago and slowly over the next billion years producing an environment that allowed eukaryotic organisms to evolve, which eventually also produced humans. Algae now grow in fresh and salt water, providing 50% of the oxygen on Earth and the base for many food webs. The pigments that enable photosynthesis in algae show cellular features unlike those in other plants or animals, presenting possibilities for sustainable biofuel production and CO2 consumption. There’s a reason for Reas’ return to plants in his unfolding series. Many dispute references to algae as plants, and a startling number of controversies arise over when and which algae can be so named, a terminological debate with vigorous feelings not unlike those provoked around the question of what is art, particularly when involving technology. 

Stepping back from the palm-sized Technical Images, the smallest works in the show that have nonetheless generated a swirl of ideas across time and space, practices and materials, leads me to the significance of “apparatus theory” in Reas’ work. Theorist Jean-Louis Baudry argued that the network of audience, filmmaker, screen, and projector constitute an apparatus that produces spectators’ charged relationship to what they view. The physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad expands the notion in productive ways for viewing the motility in Reas’ play with RGB Technical Images, a series where the final dye sublimation print on aluminium recalls the original 4×5” plate that was then guided through software, wet lab, and printing processes:

“1) apparatuses are specific material-discursive practices (they are not merely laboratory setups that embody human concepts and take measurements); 

2) apparatuses produce differences that matter—they are boundary-making practices that are formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena produced; 

3) apparatuses are material configurations/dynamic reconfigurings of the world; 4) apparatuses are themselves phenomena (constituted and dynamically reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world); 

5) apparatuses have no intrinsic boundaries but are open-ended practices; and 

6) apparatuses are not located in the world but are material configurations and reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics (i.e. they do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or evolve in space and time).”

RGB Technical Images is a project that admirably fuses what is often distinguished as the multiple steps of production between computer and wet lab, or screen and print, or digital and analog. Reas’ art coheres the complex network of his apparatus: humans (coders, printers, assistants, etc.); techniques ranging from early photography, to computer graphics, to machine learning; temporalities and affects, from the activities and attentions of all involved; knowledge systems generated through texts, creative exploration, physical labor, and collegial conversations; and, of course, the image, always there, even as it transforms, transmutes, evolves, and emerges anew in response to and by impacting this network of relations. Reas’ apparatus presents a generosity of spirit dependent on its very complexity, which as viewers we are called upon to join.

Such visions do not arrive at a glance, but favour a patient attendance. The large-scale projection of Earthly Delights 3.1 uses a custom software to play with frame rate and sequence in an indefinite duration where the vegetation from the Colorado hills morphs for a non-linear experience—the screen flickering reminiscent of summer days standing in the dappled light of a grove. Some frames move quickly, others more slowly, much like the rhythm of life. Unlike film, there is no normal 24 frame per second rate for existence, but instead the varied temporalities of our bodies and moods, the days and seasons, the calm or harried sense of appreciation we bring to the world around us. It’s hard to slow down amidst the constant demands of day to day, but the impressionistic images of Earthly Delights 3.1 create a shared space for that quiet pleasure. I recall Carl Sagan’s wisdom in Pale Blue Dot (1994), discussing another blurry image, taken by Voyager 1 while 6.4 billion kilometres away from us on February 14, 1990:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives…on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Anna Atkins’ algae, Brakhage’s moth, Reas’ Colorado grasses are there not merely to be ascertained as a means of increased knowledge, whether biological or computational, but to help us glimpse a little more of the motes around us, to look at the kind of vision we want to cultivate in order to grow together in this shared garden.

Casey Reas, Wet and Saturated Process, runs until 25 May 2024