Casey Reas: Sources and chronology

2. Canonical accession facts

Publication-safe summary

Punk6529 gave the 6529 Network Museum seven already-minted Art Blocks works by Casey Reas. The Museum accepted the full gift on 1 August 2026 and accessioned the seven works into the permanent collection on 2 August 2026. The Museum owns the tokens and the donor's transferable interest in them; copyright remains separate. The retained metadata identifies CC BY-NC 4.0, and the accession carries active software-preservation obligations.

Claims not supported by the record

• that Casey Reas selected or endorsed the seven-work group;
• that the donor described a personal selection thesis or motive beyond making the full gift;
• that the three CENTURY works form an artist-designated triptych or suite;
• that the group is a retrospective, complete survey, or canonical selection;
• that token title includes copyright;
• that accession completed autonomous preservation;
• that any work was donated because of rarity, market value, or investment potential;
• that a static Art Blocks image is the complete artwork.

3. Exact seven-object schedule

The mint timestamps and feature fields are retained platform observations. Chain identity and accession are separately verified. Feature labels are descriptive inputs, not ready-made interpretations.

4. Exact official presentation resources

Use the static outputs for close-looking and public fallback only with the appropriate attribution and surrogate label. Use the generator to study behavior and interaction. Do not infer a complete live state from one still.

Retention boundary

The initial official static PNG responses and two full-viewport screenshots for each object were referenced and hash-recorded as time-specific documentation surrogates. Their bytes were not retained in the initial public package. The visual-observation record leaves a new, attributed preservation recapture open; that future capture must be retained as a separately dated object and must not be represented as the original observation bytes. A platform thumbnail is a platform-authorized documentation state. It is never a Museum-declared canonical state unless a controlling artist, contract, or accession record explicitly gives it that status. For Phototaxis, the precise supported term is the official 1,000-iteration thumbnail state.

5. Shared 2026-08-02 close-looking baseline

These observations were made from the exact official token stills at original resolution. They are a common baseline, not language to copy unchanged into every essay.

6. Chronology of life, practice, tools, and institutions

Dates are grouped by what the source can support. “Begun,” “released,” “exhibited,” and “revisited” are not synonyms.

7. Practice-phase matrix

8. Source authority matrix

8.1 Artist-controlled primary sources

8.2 Institutional, publisher, and platform primary sources

8.3 Serious scholarship and criticism

9. Conflicts, naming problems, and distinctions to preserve

9.1 Phototaxis date

Art Blocks and the 2021 artist technical note support a 2021 release. The current artist NFT register lists 2022. Use “developed/released for Art Blocks in 2021” where discussing documented activity, and note the current artist-register discrepancy. Do not silently normalize all dates to 2022.

9.2 923 versus 924

The retained project population contains 924 invocations numbered 0-923. Invocation 0 is separately coded 999999; invocations 1-923 form the documented combinatorial sequence. The project title and artistic combinatorics refer to 923 rooms; the release population is 924. State both at the appropriate level. Do not invent an artistic theory for invocation 0.

9.3 Still Life dates

The current artist Atomism page describes Still Life software as 2015-2023; the 2016 bitforms exhibition anchors the public debut of the early works. Write “developed from 2015 and publicly presented in 2016” unless a more exact object history is established.

9.4 There's No Distance

The title names both the 2016 bitforms exhibition and a 2023 black-and-white long-form work extending Still Life. Always specify exhibition or project and date. Do not collapse them.

9.5 CENTURY dates

The wider CENTURY body begins in 2012. The donated tokens belong to the 2021 Art Blocks project. Use both dates and state what each one dates.

9.6 Pre-Process dates

The system originates in 2003, appeared in unresolved form in 2005, and was completed/released as a 120-work Art Blocks project in 2022. Do not date the tokenized work simply “2003,” and do not erase its archaeology by calling it only a 2022 project.

9.7 Artist name typography

Machine records use Casey REAS. The artist's current site often uses REAS. Normal editorial prose may use Casey Reas. Preserve exact capitalization in formal record quotations and titles.

9.8 Feral File founding

Use the institution's own account: Feral File grew from the 2019 a2p exchange and was co-founded in 2020 by Casey Reas and Sean Moss-Pultz in the Bitmark context. Avoid flattening organization/company/person roles if a sentence requires legal precision.

9.9 Token, artwork, image, code

• The token records chain identity, edition, and transfer history; title, copyright, accession, and interpretation are recorded separately.
• The script and token hash are constitutive inputs for these Art Blocks works.
• The generator executes the work in a browser/runtime environment.
• The static PNG is a project-authorized or platform-generated documentation state, not the whole live work.
• A Museum screenshot or video is documentation unless an artist-approved manifestation says otherwise.

9.10 923 EMPTY ROOMS city and colorform schedule

The controlling presenter record is Bright Moments, “923 EMPTY ROOMS”. Use this exact six-city schedule and mapping:

Buenos Aires is not one of the six project cities. The donated #713 is associated with Mexico City / CDMX; its code 555536 contains four Pyramids, one Cargo, and one Moon.

10. Critical argument bank

These are propositions to test, not conclusions to repeat automatically.

1. Reas's enduring subject is the interval between instruction and event.
2. The visible image is often a history of relations rather than a picture of an object.
3. His authorship lies in constructing possibility spaces and exclusions, not withdrawing from decision.
4. Physical prints and drawings do not merely reproduce software; they disclose resolution, density, duration, and material trace differently.
5. Processing and Feral File matter because they extend studio values—legibility, iteration, access, peer exchange—into shared infrastructures, but they are not interchangeable with the artworks.
6. The move into blockchain is continuous with earlier questions but materially changes edition, instantiation, distribution, ownership, and public comparison.
7. Transparency of rule can coexist with perceptual opacity; viewers may know the system and still confront fatigue or illegibility.
8. Reas's work has repeatedly moved between endogenous systems and source-image systems: artificial agents and Process on one side; broadcast, cinema, photography, and ML datasets on the other.
9. The seven-work Museum group is strongest as a longitudinal argument built from recent tokens that reach backward into older systems, not as a survey of all media.
10. The gift's institutional significance lies in transferring a coherent study group into public trust and accepting its preservation obligations, not in market status.

11. Required omissions to acknowledge in the monograph and collection essay

The Museum group contains:

• three works from the 2021 Art Blocks CENTURY project;
• one Pre-Process;
• one Phototaxis;
• one 923 EMPTY ROOMS;
• one Ex Nihilo (Cosmos).

It does not contain:

• an early Path, Tissue, or MicroImage print/software installation;
• a Software Structures implementation;
• a Process text, print, software work, or installation;
• a Processing archive or edition;
• an Ultraconcentrated / Signal to Noise work;
• an A Mathematical Theory of Communication work;
• a Compressed Cinema still or video;
• an In Silico work;
• a physical print, plotter drawing, woodblock, book, sculpture, or installation component;
• a representative work from every major body.

These absences are future collecting opportunities and interpretive limits. They do not invalidate the accession.