Brendan Dawes

where data becomes poetry

Project name: In Harmony; The Five Boroughs
Description: Digital sculptures created from New York population density data

via portfolio site

brendandawes.com

It is difficult to describe what kind of creative Brendan Dawes is – only that he remains forever curious, inspired by data and the web. I’m a huge fan of Brendan as a designer, artist and speaker and have been lucky to see him speak several times and had the chance to chat to him, too ~ he is a lovely person to talk to as well. I’ve been following him since the days of Flash, back in the late 90s. This was a very creative time on the web – time for explorations and experiments and very creative work. This was a period when Brendan created the most lovely apps and designs. And he kept going. And going… and going… and keeps inspiring us all ツ
Do check out his site ~ there is tons to see and read, no doubt it will be inspirational ツ

More about Brendan

There is a story Brendan Dawes tells about the beginning of everything. A teenager in the north of England, he plugged in a Sinclair ZX81 and a cursor blinked on screen, waiting. That small invitation—type something—never stopped resonating. Decades later, Brendan is one of the most original voices in digital art: a British artist and designer who has spent thirty years asking what happens when you take the invisible flow of data and coax it into something felt.^[1]

His philosophy is straightforward to state and genuinely hard to execute. He says it plainly on his own website: “Data by itself is not enough; data needs poetry.”^[1] Not information design. Not charts. Something closer to the experience of standing in front of a painting and emersing yourself in its detail, attempting to see a message, a meaning and to absor its energy and atmosphere.

From rave scenes to ready-mades

The path to that philosophy was not a straight line. In the early nineties, Brendan was part of Manchester’s rave scene ~ not as a musician in any conventional sense, but as a constructor. Unable to play an instrument, he built tracks by combining samples, programming drum machines and sequencers, pulling disparate materials into something new. He now recognises this as foundational: the combination of existing things to make something different ~ the ready-made as starting point, long before he had a name for it.^[2]

When the music career ended (with, as he has put it, “absolutely no money”), Brendan spent eight years working in a factory, writing code in whatever time he could carve out. In 1996 the web arrived, and with it a job as a web designer, a change in direction, and a lifelong practice.^[2]

The fingerprint of a film

In 2004, Brendan created Cinema Redux. The premise is ever so simple: distil an entire film into a single image. Each horizontal row represents one minute of screen time, made up of sixty frames taken at one-second intervals. Stack every row from first frame to last, and what you have is a visual fingerprint: a unique identity for a film that reveals things the moving image never shows you. The slow drift of colour across an act. The sudden jolt of a cut. The palette of a decade.^[3]

The Guardian wrote that it might give “film students, academics and obsessives” entirely new ways of thinking about how cinema works.^[4] In 2008, four years after it was made, Cinema Redux entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.^[4] It has since been shown in three exhibitions at MoMA, and in 2015 became part of Big Bang Data, a touring exhibition that travelled to thirteen cities worldwide.^[1]

Eleven cities, one moment

A decade after Cinema Redux, Brendan was commissioned by the telecommunications company EE to mark the launch of 4G across eleven British cities. Each city would receive its own digital portrait ~ a large-scale artwork built entirely from data.

For the structure of each piece, Brendan turned to something unexpected: the mathematics that govern the arrangement of seeds in the head of a sunflower. Time spirals outward from the centre, each point representing one minute, with 4,320 points in total — three days’ worth of minutes, covering the day before, during, and after each city’s 4G launch.^[5]

The data itself, collected by University College London, came from millions of social media conversations, filtered for keywords tied to the events of the day: Hurricane Sandy, the James Bond film Skyfall, money, alongside subjects specific to each location.^[5] The resulting prints, each measuring 40 by 77 inches and mounted on aluminium, are beautiful in the way natural systems often are: complex without being chaotic, patterned without being cold.

In the London portrait, you can see the exact moment Hurricane Sandy made landfall in New York. And you can see, just one day later, the moment almost nobody was talking about it anymore ~ a quiet, unsettling document of how briefly even major events hold collective attention.^[5]

Making a thing which makes a thing

What Brendan builds, at its core, are systems. He describes his approach as using code to “make a thing which makes a thing”^[1] ~ generative processes, written by hand, that produce work he could not produce alone. But what distinguishes his practice from data visualisation is the consistent insistence on feeling. He has said he is not interested in providing answers; he wants his work to function as a lens for asking more questions ~ one that leaves gaps, openings that “let shadows in,” because without them the work is soulless.^[2]

That instinct was at the centre of Moments Spent with Others, an exhibition at GAZELL.iO in London in 2022. Three pieces, three memories: time on a park bench with his wife; watching films late at night with his father; a slow afternoon in New York eating pizza with his friend and fellow designer Hillman Curtis, who has since died.

The Happiness Machine

Not everything Brendan makes is large in scale or complex in system. Some of it is a simple button on a wooden box.

The Happiness Machine, created in 2012, is an internet-connected printer. Press the button and it prints a random happy thought from a random person somewhere on the web ~ a real person, behind a real screen name ~ on a small slip of paper you can tear off and take with you. The piece was inspired by a passage in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine and powered by We Feel Fine, a project that harvested expressions of human feeling from blogs across the internet.^[6]

Brendan described the thinking plainly: the internet, for him, is “a network of people, not machines,” and the Happiness Machine was built to make that fact physical and undeniable — to translate something invisible and vast into something you could hold in your hand.^[6]

It was shown at the London Design Festival in 2012, at the Wired Store in New York, and at the Dconstruct conference in 2013.^[6] It is, in some ways, the smallest thing Brendan has made. It is also, possibly, the warmest.

I love this piece as it aligns what I am hoping to do with this site: making creativity tangible, human, and a little bit joyful. The idea that somewhere out there, a stranger pressed a button and a slip of paper emerged carrying their happy thought forward feels quietly radical and utterly wonderful ツ

The most popular print

Among all of this ~ the MoMA acquisitions, the Sundance premiere, the city portraits ~ Brendan’s most widely shared image is a hand-drawn scribble on a piece of paper.

The Process is a screen print on black card, produced in fluorescent pink ink, that describes the creative experience as Brendan understands it: a tangled, knotted, overlapping mess at the start, slowly working its way through successive stages of simplification until, at the end, a single clean circle. He drew it years ago, included it in many talks and has described it as probably his most popular print ~ more circulated, more recognised, than anything produced with code or data.^[7]

It was part of the first talk I ever saw from Brendan ~ and many of us related so much! It has a directness and truth to it that is simple and brilliant. Whatever the tools, whatever the data, the act of making is always the same tangled, circling, deeply human thing.

The world’s first generative film

In 2024, Brendan collaborated with documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit on a project that had not existed before: a film that is different every single time it plays. Eno ~ a portrait of the musician, producer, and artist Brian Eno ~ uses over 400 hours of footage from Eno’s personal archive, recombined each time by a generative engine with an almost incomprehensible number of possible versions: 52 quintillion.^[1]

No two screenings are the same. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature ~ a formal recognition of something that goes well beyond the documentary form as it has existed until now.^[1]

Where data meets the handmade

Brendan and his work is not an obvious subject for a site about making things with your hands. He works in code, not clay; in data, not watercolour. But his central convictions feel entirely at home here ~ and I simply love his work, his sharing spirit and his enthusiasm for creativity.

That data alone is never enough. That making things requires a kind of poetry. That the creative process is inherently untidy, and that the mess is not a problem to be solved but the thing itself. That, in the words of the book he published on his own creative process, comfort is the enemy of creativity.^[8] That the most interesting starting points are often the most ordinary: a walk in a park, a late film with a parent, a slice of pizza with a friend.^[2]

His practice reminds me that what we make does not need to be monumental to be meaningful. The smallest data— a minute, a conversation, a memory, a happy thought on a slip of paper—can carry the weight of something much larger.

That is what art does. And it is what making things, in any form, has always been about.

Explore Brendan Dawes’s work at brendandawes.com and his book, Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design. He is represented in the UK and Europe by Gazelli Art House.

Footnotes

1. Brendan Dawes, About page; accessed June 2026[↩︎][↩︎][↩︎][↩︎][↩︎][↩︎]
2. Brendan Dawes, interview with ArtPlugged, 5 July 2022. ‘Brendan Dawes Sparks Thought and Imagination Through a Data-Driven Practice.’; accessed June 2026.[↩︎][↩︎][↩︎][↩︎][↩︎]
3. Brendan Dawes, Cinema Redux project page; accessed June 2026. The Guardian quotation by John Walters is cited on the project page and corroborated at gazelliarthouse.com; the original article was published in The Guardian’s Friday Review section c. 2004 at arts.guardian.co.uk (URL no longer accessible) [↩︎]
4. Brendan Dawes, Cinema Redux project page; accessed June 2026. The Guardian quotation by John Walters is cited on the project page and corroborated at gazelliarthouse.com; the original article was published in The Guardian’s Friday Review section c. 2004 at arts.guardian.co.uk (URL no longer accessible) [↩︎][↩︎]
5. Brendan Dawes, EE Digital City Portraits project page; accessed June 2026.[↩︎][↩︎][↩︎]
6. Brendan Dawes, The Happiness Machine project page; accessed June 2026. We Feel Fine is at wefeelfine.org: note that the site is live and its static pages (mission, gallery, methodology) remain accessible, but the original interactive experience required Java and no longer runs in modern browsers. Jonathan Harris’s project page at jjh.org/we-feel-fine also hosts downloadable desktop applications.[↩︎][↩︎][↩︎]
7. Brendan Dawes, ‘The Process is probably my most popular print.’; accessed June 2026.[↩︎]
8. Brendan Dawes. *Analog In, Digital Out: Brendan Dawes on Interaction Design.* Peachpit Press, 2007. ISBN 9780321429162. ‘Comfort is the enemy of creativity’ referenced in publisher descriptions at peachpit.com and oreilly.com[↩︎]