Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

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Everything is data. The seemingly small moments in life, those transient scars, bumps and scratches from the every day, are a constant stream of data. When captured and amplified, they say so much.

Yet data by itself is not enough; data needs poetry. Within the data, I leave space for the unexpected to grow, for shadows to creep in. This creates an environment for others to play within, to bring themselves into the work.

These environments are created from algorithmic and generative systems, formed from code, data and mathematics; a rule-based playground designed to surface surprise and delight.

Brendan Dawes is a UK based artist using generative systems involving data, machine learning and code.

A Lumen Prize and Aesthetica Art prize Alumni, his work has been featured in many exhibitions across the world including Big Bang Data in thirteen cities, three MoMA shows in New York, Brighton Digital Festival, ArtFutura and ZKM. His Cinema Redux work becoming part of the MoMA permanent collection in 2008.

Following his Genesis NFT on KnownOrigin selling within the hour to legendary collector WhaleShark, Dawes went on to release a collection on Nifty Gateway – selling out in under sixty seconds. He has also released work on MakersPlace, Foundation and SuperRare. He was part of ‘NTFism: No Fear in Trying’ curated by Kenny Schachter. His work has been auctioned at Sotheby’s Natively Digital: A Curated NFT Sale, The Burnt Auction – the first NFT sale offered by an auction house in France with Fauve Paris and Generative Art and The Future an art exhibition in Shenzhen hosted by China’s largest auction house, Beijing Poly.

He is represented in the UK and Europe by Gazelli Art House.

Highlights include creating 99,999 generative snowflakes for the Winter 2020 limited edition release of Field Notes; a story-telling installation at the Sundance Film Festival for Airbnb; a generative installation for Twitter creating real-time digital creatures in response to tweets; a campaign for Trend Micro showing the beauty of Cyber security data; a print campaign for EE visualising social media traffic in eleven UK cities captured over three days; a 360 degree video projection for Platts displaying the journey of over 3000 ships as well as work now part of the permanent collection at MoMA in New York, creating a visual fingerprint of an entire movie.

Selected Solo Shows

Selected Group Shows

Publications

Coverage