Following the successful release of Collisions - Volume One, artist Brendan Dawes returns to MakersPlace for the second release in the series, utilizing his personally imported Manifold contract. Each piece in the collection includes a signed print.

Brendan Dawes employs generative processes involving data, machine learning, and code to craft interactive installations, electronic objects, online experiences, data visualizations, motion graphics, and physical sculptures. His work, both conceptually dense and aesthetically pleasing, creates a stimulating body of art. Dawes draws much of his inspiration from popular culture and nature, often centering his work on themes of time and memory.

He has participated in three MoMA shows - "Design and the Elastic Mind", "Action! Design Over Time", and "Talk to Me" – with his piece "Cinema Redux" being acquired for the permanent collection in 2008. As an alumnus of the Lumen Prize and Aesthetica Art Prize, Dawes' work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including Big Bang Data, which took place in thirteen cities.

This October, Dawes will debut a groundbreaking immersive generative video art installation at the Venice Biennale. Created in collaboration with documentary filmmaker Gary Hustwit and featuring the work of Brian Eno, the recipient of The 2023 Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, this installation promises to be a captivating experience. Titled Nothing Can Ever Be The Same, the 168-hour-long video uses Eno’s music, ideas, art, and other documentary material to construct a vast palette of sounds and images, which are interpreted by custom generative software.

ARTIST STATEMENT 

For me, the biggest threat to humanity – aside from Climate Change – is that which comes from increasing polarization. The ability for us to see someone else’s point of view, to empathize, to think about the surrounding context always serves us better, yet more and more I see evidence to the contrary. 

This is particularly true seeing the reaction to the growing field of AI, especially in respect of its use in an artistic context. Yet these tools can offer us new ways to imagine, think, and create. 

These new techniques don’t exist outside of other techniques and practices but merge and become entangled with all that we’ve already learned and continue to learn as artists together with the yet unknown. They collide and coalesce into new branches and paths that we might journey down. 

This series of works is a visual response to this idea: forms and objects created from the pre-existent and the never-was to inspire, provoke, and question what it means to be an artist in the age of Artificial Intelligence.