Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

That Was The Week That Was — 28th April 2019

The week started out on a sad note when John Davey announced he was ending the Reasons festival which happens in Brighton each year. I wrote about my own feelings about Flash on the Beach — the predecessor to Reasons — on my blog, and it was lovely to see all the tweets that came flooding in to John, talking about how they loved that conference. I'm sure John will be back with something equally as good.

After putting together a contract for a potential new piece of work, I spent the rest of the week mostly working in Houdini on the titles for the forthcoming Beyond Tellerrand conference as well as developing the other project I've been loving working on — more on that in a second.

Jenny Odell's book arrived and now I just need to find time to start reading it — a little ironic considering the title is How to Do Nothing.

There seemed to be lots of admin type things this week. When people talk about working for yourself nobody really mentions these bits that take up time. One such thing is having to fill in a permit system so I can enter the large headquarters of one of my clients to effect an update to the installation that is running there. It all takes time, but I try and have systems in place to make these types of things as painless as possible, plus I try and get this kind of stuff done as quickly as I can, so I can get on with the stuff I want to do. One thing I would highly recommend is one of those tab grabber things you find in pro kitchens. I pin up my tasks for the day and get a great deal of satisfaction as I remove them.

On the Thursday I added the remaining prints of my Talk-Action=Shit letterpress print into my shop. I had these made years ago and I thought the few remaining prints were lost, but luckily John Davey still had them so it seemed only right that I make this popular print available again.

On Friday I had an invite to Moscow to give a talk at a festival there. Obviously I said yes, then realised getting a visa may be a problem as in two weeks I go to Dusseldorf and then go to Russia the day after I get back. After some research it looks like it may be possible...

The Saturday found me exporting various examples of this new project which I can finally talk about. I'm collaborating with Gary Hustwit on creating a Generative Film Engine, testing with footage from his recent documentary about Dieter Rams. Video clips, voice-overs, sound effects and Brian Eno's original score is all composited together in real-time to create something more akin to a stream of consciousness than a film. The aim was to create a short demo of what we've been cooking-up for when Gary did his talk at OFFF in Barcelona on Saturday evening. The plan is to continue to develop the system and to see how it might be used on any type of film and in what context.

Music I listened to this week included Rodrigo y Gabriela, Ludovico Einaudi Fountains of Wayne, Prince and Black Sabbath.