Brendan Dawes is a British artist and designer known for playful, thought-provoking work with data, technology and everyday objects. Rooted in remix culture, he recontextualises found objects and code to explore how people experience the physical and digital worlds, often drawing on the Dada concept of the readymade.He left school at 16 and first explored remixing as a teenager making loops for bootleg breakbeat albums.,
Dawes gained wider recognition for Cinema Redux, a visualization that breaks entire films into cinematic fingerprints revealing patterns hidden in familiar footage. The work entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008, following its inclusion in MoMA's “Design and the Elastic Mind” that year. His work has since been 3D printed aboard the International Space Station and shown in three MoMA exhibitions, the touring “Big Bang Data” show across thirteen cities, and events including ZKM's Season of Media Arts and the Brighton Digital Festival.
With the arrival of NFTs, Dawes found a new relationship with collectors of his work. In 2022 he released Moments Spent with Others, a triptych sold as a single NFT that renders the same memory from three different perspectives using an algorithm keyed to time and imagery. In the work, older memories appear less complex and more blurred than recent ones, reflecting how memory itself degrades over time.His NFT-era work has been auctioned at Sotheby's Natively Digital sale, shown at Christie's in New York and included in Fauve Paris's Burnt Auction, the first NFT sale offered by a French auction house.
In 2024 Dawes collaborated with the American filmmaker Gary Hustwit to create Eno, a generative documentary about the musician and artist Brian Eno with 52 quintillion possible versions, no two screenings alike. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024 and was later shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Dawes is a Visiting Professor of Computational Art at Manchester Metropolitan University and is represented in the UK and Europe by Gazelli Art House.
