Feral File

Feral File began with Casey Reas’s desire to create more opportunities for artists. We had already been experimenting together at Bitmark, including a2p, a project where artists exchanged editions of their work. When UCLA went into lockdown during COVID, Casey proposed extending that into an online gallery.

Casey felt that artists working with software were making important art that needed more thoughtful presentation and context. He wanted to bring the work together in curated exhibitions, with writing that helped people understand what they were seeing and encouraged them to explore further. We built Feral File around that.

  • The Social Codes exhibition page, with six artworks arranged in a grid beneath the curator’s note.
    Social Codes, our first exhibition, curated by Casey Reas.
  • Invitation to the Social Codes online opening on March 19, 2021, with colorful abstract forms and the participating artists’ names.
    The invitation to our first opening. March 19, 2021.
  • An introduction to a2p beside a grid of works exchanged by participating artists.
    a2p, the artist-to-artist exchange that came before Feral File.
  • A slide combining a2p with The Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement as an early formula for Feral File.
    An early shorthand: a2p plus an artists’ rights agreement.
  • Exhibition cards for -GRAPH and Unsupervised, showing a warped line grid and a colorful cloud of forms.
    -GRAPH, curated by Casey, and Unsupervised, by Refik Anadol.
  • An open notebook with Casey Reas’s handwritten notes from the Feral File 2.0 conversation.
    Casey’s notebook after a conversation about what we were calling Feral File 2.0. What we wanted to keep, and what we wanted to iterate on.
  • Three cream-colored -GRAPH invitation designs made from type, dots, and small geometric marks.
    Designs by the artists in -GRAPH. Nearly the entire show was self-organized, with the most incredible energy.
  • Exhibition cards for Peer to Peer with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and Gray Matter by Auriea Harvey.
    Peer to Peer with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Gray Matter by Auriea Harvey.
  • Three Autonomy app screens showing an artwork collection, a wallet connection, and an individual work.
    Autonomy, the app we built for collecting and viewing digital art.
  • Visitors gathered around Refik Anadol’s large, brightly colored Unsupervised installation in MoMA’s atrium.
    Refik Anadol’s Unsupervised at MoMA.
  • “Support artists because they are society’s R&D.” — Paola Antonelli.
  • Rows of boxed Feral File art computers on wooden shelves in my home garage.
    Building and storing art computers in my home garage. Somehow, so many good things come out of the garage.
  • A room image showing Toko with LIA’s black-and-white dada data above a yellow armchair, beside a floor lamp and flowers.
    Feral File Toko, shown with dada data by LIA.

I came to it through design and engineering. Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with the art. Spending time with the works, reading the curatorial notes, and learning how artists approached their materials changed how I understood technology I’d been working with for decades, since I was five or six.

As that happened, I became more interested in how to bring this art to more people. That eventually brought me back to hardware: first FF1, our Art Computer, and now Toko, which combines the computer and display in one object.

Much of my work now is figuring out how to make this art easier to live with. Casey and I are also evolving the exhibitions, bringing existing works into new contexts and caring for them so people can keep discovering and returning to the art over time.