That Was The Week That Was – 2nd March 2025

At some point this week I realised 2025 marked 25 years since I first registered brendandawes.com. It's been my corner of the web where over those years I've shared my work, code, observations and process. I'm a big believer in owning your content, not placing it on some third party platform which can just be turned off overnight, or a platform you feel the need to leave because a man-child oligarch has taken over. I'm in control of my content and I encourage everyone else to do the same with theirs.

I didn't want to let this anniversary just simply go by so I came up with a new generative plotted work, each one unique, called Certain Irregularities. Created in Processing, it uses the AxiDraw I bought in 2016, which for the last few years has been gathering dust. The system creates 25 possible points and then draws lines between a random selection of them, occasionally drawing boxes, reminiscent of a calendar. The work speaks to my love of play, of randomness, of the unexpected, of the beauty of imperfection – something which John Ruskin beautifully talked about and was the inspiration for the title of the work:

...imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyse vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for their imperfections. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect.

So I put this out there on the Thursday and the reaction has been wonderful. Some people have bought ten copies at a time, which I'm very grateful for. I personally love the form factor – A5 and on handmade paper with a decal edge, as if it's been ripped almost from a notebook.

I'm definitely going to be adding more such works in the coming weeks as I continue to explore the possibilities of the AxiDraw and Processing.

You can buy Certain Irregularities here.