Many of Casey Reas' programmatic artworks resemble things you see in nature—tangles of leaves, daffodils, bee colonies, algae—but they’re anything but.

To help further this exploration, Reas and his colleague Ben Fry (a principal of Fathom, a design and software consultancy in Boston) in 2001 developed their own software, called Processing, that bridges the divide between programming and art, making both processes more intuitive.