Brendan Dawes
Brendan Dawes is a British artist and designer renowned for his playful yet thought-provoking explorations of data, technology, and everyday objects. Rooted in the ethos of remix culture, Dawes’s code-based work often re-contextualises existing materials to examine how people experience the physical and digital worlds. By blending code, found objects, and tactile interfaces, he creates works that invite audiences to consider the poetry hidden in mundane moments and the hidden structures within complex data. Exhibited globally, his acclaimed piece Cinema Redux is part of MoMA’s permanent collection, whilst his works have been auctioned at both Sotheby's and Christie's.
In 2024 he collaborated with American film maker Gary Hustwit to make the world’s first generative film, about the musician, producer and artist Brian Eno. The film, titled Eno, is unique every time it is viewed, with 52 quintillion possible versions. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
A Lumen Prize alumnus, he is a Visiting Professor of Computational Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and is represented by Gazelli Art House, London.
Talk: Plug and Play
Designer? Developer? Maker? Who cares? More and more it’s getting harder to describe someone who makes things in the 21st Century. To Brendan Dawes a modern day designer can be equally comfortable creating a CRON job on the server as easily as creating a baseline grid. In this session Brendan Dawes takes you through his approach to making things; things made for himself as well as things made for clients, often sharing the same question – “how the hell am I going to make that?” From hardware to software and everything in-between Brendan shows how curiosity and a thirst to learn new things drives him on to become a better maker of things.
