British artist and technologist Brendan Dawes has spent over two decades exploring the relationship between people and technology through generative code and data. At the heart of his practice is a fascination with how small, discrete elements coalesce into larger wholes. While Houdini was once his go-to tool for building procedural graphics, a turning point came when he attended a presentation where TouchDesigner itself was being used to deliver the talk. Watching the interface in action, he immediately thought, "This is what a creative tool in the digital age looks like." We were delighted to discover that Brendan had embraced TouchDesigner, weaving it into his practice with the same curiosity and playful experimentation that has long defined his work. The result is a growing collection of interactive installations and digital artworks that feel less like finished compositions than glimpses into evolving systems. Read on for our conversation with Brendan Dawes.
Derivative: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and the trajectory of your artistic practice?
Brendan Dawes: My path to an artistic practice was never planned, having never been to any kind of art school or even any kind of college or university. To be honest I never really knew what I wanted to do when I left school, though looking back I spent all of my spare time down at the local video game arcades playing these new machines such as Space Invaders, Asteroids, Tempest and Defender. Living in a seaside town in the North of England we had many arcades to choose from, created to tempt the tourists that would flood the town in the summer. These machines replete with their flashy bright visuals and wonderful sounds no doubt spoke to me in some way, how a machine could engage and entertain.
Eventually that would lead to me getting a Sinclair ZX81 at the end of 1981 and beginning to learn to code. Here was this small black box which I could type things into and have it do things. I found that so compelling, yet I never looked to a career in computer programming and got into mixing, making breakbeats and the like and selling them via adverts in the back of the NME. The idea of taking ready-mades such as found things such as beats and remixing them into other forms is something that still sits at the heart of my process.
My music explorations would then find me taking a sound engineering course in Manchester, discovering early samplers such as the Akai S900 and sequencers like Cubase which would lead to a short lived record career with 3 Beat Music in Liverpool where I put out some rave singles under the name Vitamin Beat. They were typical 90s orchestra stab dance tunes but it was a lot of fun at the time.
Whilst I was enjoying making things with computers, it was earning me no money so I ended up taking a job in a factory, drilling holes in fibre-glass for the next eight years. Then the web came along and in 1996, I left and never looked back, going from a coder to an art director to then helping found a design agency. I eventually left that in 2012 to concentrate on my art career which was just starting to take shape after having work — Cinema Redux — featured in a MoMA exhibition in 2008.
Derivative: You've mentioned that everything around us is data, that we can walk into, trip over it, and that we can also shape it as you do, into artifacts like physical objects, print works, online experiences, and data visualizations. It seems that data and the stories that can be derived from it are central to your work. Can you share a bit about your creative process and what sparked this fascination?
Brendan Dawes: I would never describe myself as someone who does "data visualisation" as I'm not sure you can really extract anything meaningful from any work I've done which has involved data in some form. I see data more as a material, something that is a source material which can be used as a starting point or a form which I can then play with, to push and pull into an idea. The first work I ever had any success with — Cinema Redux — samples frames of classic film at one second intervals, building up rows one minute in length so you're left with a visual impression of the entire film. I never ever thought of that work as data viz but it was later pointed out to me that frames of the film were indeed data yet they weren't abstracted into another form – they were just frames. It's only when you see all those frames in their entirety that they become something else. Since then combining small discreet things into larger wholes has always been at the heart of my work.
Back in 1983 I had bought New Order's Blue Monday with what would become the iconic cover by Peter Saville with its colour coded strip and nothing else on the floppy disc-inspired cover. I realise all these years later that it was not only the first great piece of graphic design that I can remember but also the first data visualisation that must have had some effect on me. Cinema Redux is a series of strips so to speak. Did that cover hide away in my head only to influence my thought process many years later? Most recently I took this idea of that colour coded strip and made a thing I called Chromacode, so that every single project on my website and every single blog post produces a unique, deterministic bar code-like graphic, very much inspired by the Blue Monday cover. I still have that record too!
Derivative: What was your introduction to TouchDesigner?
Brendan Dawes: Well long before I discovered TouchDesigner I had fallen in love with Cycling 74's Max/MSP and Jitter. Before that point I coded things the traditional way (and still do) by typing instructions and having them execute in some way. I always felt like it wasn't immediate enough – it didn't seem playful like sketching with a pencil can feel, and you had to hammer out letters in certain order, using a certain syntax to make things happen. When I started to make things in Max/MSP it just felt joyful and fun, wiring things together and seeing their immediate effects. Then when I was speaking at an FITC event in Toronto there was a session from one of the Derivative team on this software called TouchDesigner.
I remember that even the presentation was created in TouchDesigner. The whole interface, the way you zoomed in and out of components and it just made me think, "this is what a creative tool in a digital age looks like."
Though I have to be honest, whilst I dabbled with it I had a lot of projects at the time which I was coding in a traditional way, using mostly Processing which I still love, and so I had my head down getting various project done using things I knew how to do.
Yet there's a danger in doing things you're familiar with. Complacency can set in and at the end of 2018, after feeling disappointed with a piece of work that I was less than happy with, I felt I needed to completely reset how I worked.
That was when I started to get into Houdini. The node based system felt so familiar to me having been there with Max/MSP and TouchDesigner, yet you could also write Vex code too. I threw myself headlong into it and about a month after first opening it I created The Art of Cybersecurity for Trend Micro which had the effect of giving me a whole new lease of life. I could still use data, I could still code but now it was on a wholly different executional level.
So now I was fully into a node based way of working, yet Houdini is non-realtime so that's when I started to look again at TouchDesigner and began to try and understand it better, much of that coming from having been using Houdini and all my learnings from using that software.
Derivative: NOW BECOMES THEN is a procedural publication hi-lighting some of your work created over a 20-year span. Can tell us a bit more about this work and can you explain how you used TouchDesigner in conjunction with the other tools like Houdini, Processing, Python etc. in the creation of this work?
Brendan Dawes: I've always loved the power that comes from combining simple things to create something greater than the sum of its parts. Take the pipe operator in Unix, which allows you to feed the output of one procedure into another. It's beautiful in its simplicity yet incredibly flexible and powerful.
That's how I see TouchDesigner – simple components of a system which do one thing well which becomes something bigger when combined with other components.
Combining things — whether that be thoughts and ideas or code and processes — lets you build things in a much more modular way, so when I'm developing any new project, I'm often thinking about combining different techniques and tools to manifest an idea.
So when I was thinking about creating something to mark twenty five years since registering brendandawes.com I liked the idea of creating something tactile that you could hold in your hands. Whilst my work is created using digital tools elsewhere I'm a big fan of analogue tools; I read physical books, I listen to music on vinyl and I write everyday in a pocket notebook. At the same time I wanted this thing to be large enough to be able to place on your wall if needed so I had the idea of a creating a broadsheet newspaper derived from those twenty five years of work. Yet instead of simply creating a Monograph style look back at my output, I thought it would be fun to create new things from the old things — souvenirs so to speak of those objects I had put into the world since 2000.
A few years earlier I had created a series of sculptures denoting when certain collectors had bought my work during the whole NFT craze. The sculptures were created from an algorithm I had developed that took an alphanumeric string and create unique forms using that data all done in Houdini. With this newspaper idea I thought it might be interesting to use that same technique to create forms from the titles of projects. For the accompanying text, rather that have a blurb about the project, I instead ran each project description through a local LLM using Ollama to create Haiku's for each project.
This was all done inside of TouchDesigner, where Touch read in all my projects via an API on my site, queried Ollama through a module I had made previously, generated the typography and then composited the final pages using the renders of the sculptural forms from Houdini. Each time it ran it would generate new compositions. At the end of the process I had hundreds of images which I then curated into the final pages used to make up the newspaper. I also used a Python script to randomise the order of the pages before seeding it to print!
Now Becomes Then is really an example of what happens not only when seemingly disparate things are combined but the power of interoperability.
When things can talk to, communicate and understand other things it leads to new possibilities, new forms, richer results.
It also acts as a document of my work and I feel documenting the work is important — if only for myself. Each week I write a post on my blog detailing what I've been working on — or at least the things I am allowed to talk about — plus there's quite a few TouchDesigner things on there including the odd tutorial of techniques which others may find useful. Often times I find myself trying to remember a thing I was playing around with and I pretty much always find it noted down on my site. I would encourage everyone to document their work on their own website, which you control. Instagram is all fine but one day it'll be turned off and you'll have no say about it.
https://brendandawes.com/blog/tag:touchdesigner
Beyond Tellerrand 15th Anniversary Posters
In my mind TouchDesigner is a very much the Swiss Army Knife of generative software and there's pretty much nothing it can't do. To many people I guess it's a software for live visuals but I love to also use it for creating print based work, not only as a compositing tool with Now Becomes Then but also creating work meant for print directly in Touch.
For the 15th anniversary of Beyond Tellerrand, the German creative conference run by Marc Thiele, I was asked to create the visual identity for the event, including a series of posters for each speaker. A few years ago I had done the graphics for the 2019 event all in Houdini, but this time I wanted to create the work in TouchDesigner.
The core idea came from how I felt about this wonderful event and how it's always a lens to see the world differently and how each speaker, each attendee brings their own perspective through talks and conversations. So I wanted to give form to that plurality, starting out with creating a deterministic system to create simple doodle like sketched lines, symbolising the start of an idea.
The relationship between the sketched line and the solid shape was to me a representation of that thing you start off with in your head and the final manifested form.
For the type I used a few different type faces from David Jonathan Ross and again used the seed phrase to not only choose the type used on each letter form but also the layout. In the background was every single speaker who had spoken at the event in those fifteen years, each time being shuffled for each iteration. Finally at the bottom right corner is a serial number which I can decode at a later date if I wanted to recreate the poster exactly.
Drift
I've been lucky enough to talk at Beyond Tellerrand and other events over the years and in that time I've used the obligatory Keynote but more often than not I've used my own presentation software, so I can have more of an identity on stage and create a piece of software that only has the things I need, namely show images, videos and the occasional text.
My latest iteration is all done in TouchDesigner, made from a series of folders — one per "chapter" which can contain any number of images, videos and text files. The system uses a Replicator to create a Base node for each slide which I can flip through in the usual way. The nice thing is before I get into a talk, the system shows an 3D overview of the presentation, with particles seeming to emanate from each slide, as the background colour gently changes. To me these are hopefully the ideas that may transpire when I talk about my work. I also wanted to suggest that this talk is not a fixed thing as it's all in realtime and is changing as I go through it, with text gently coming in and out of focus, and colours shifting. On top of that I also have a realtime drone sound I can switch on as the audience file in or if there's a Q&A afterwards. I like to think of this system more as an artwork than a piece of presentation software.
Derivative: How have the new POPs operator family been integrated into your practice? Have you considered how you would have used POPs to re-engineer any of your past works?
Brendan Dawes: I think the POPs operator family is a huge leap in TouchDesigner's capabilities. SOPs are great but POPs is another level, especially from someone coming from Houdini. I love how the community has been releasing some amazing extensions such as POPX from Mini UV, which very much reminded me of the MOPS extensions for Houdini. There's also the Filter POP which he's just released which was the missing piece of the POPs family, so you can do attribute changes over time all on the GPU which opens up so many possibilities. Over the last year I've been experimenting with various layout/cutups systems using geometry in SOPs but when I saw POPs I started to move those experiments over and dig deeper into all that POPs can bring.
Derivative: How have you gone about learning TouchDesigner, and the techniques to get what you imagine? What challenges have you encountered while using TouchDesigner, and do you have any suggestions on how to make it easier? Additionally, are there any operators, features or capabilities—big or small—that you wish were part of TouchDesigner (especially with your Houdini experience)?
Brendan Dawes: In the early days I watched loads of Matthew Ragan's videos — they're so good! I also subscribe to a few Patreons such as Sarv.
Ultimately though the best way to learn is to just get stuck in and play around with an idea and see where it takes you. Touch encourages a sketch like, playful process in the way that it's built and being able to immediately see the effects.
A few things I would love to see is better type support especially in a 3D environment, built in SVG import and a better approach to being able to use Git for projects, though I heard this is being worked on for a future release.
Derivative: Are there any new or upcoming technologies or capabilities in the realm of digital art that you're particularly excited about or, conversely, concerned about?
Brendan Dawes: Of course AI is what everyone is talking about. I have and continue to use it in various ways but mostly I'm using the machine learning side rather than generative AI image generation. I think we need to be careful that we're not bombarded by a world of average digital art because that's what AI is good at — creating averages. The work needs to represent you as an artist, your uniqueness, your flaws, your fears, your message. Otherwise the work says nothing.
Derivative: Do you have any upcoming projects or collaborations that you can share?
Brendan Dawes: Much of the work I'm doing now are all things I'm not allowed to talk about, but one thing I can say is I'm working on a solo show with Gazelli Art House which will debut nearer the end of the year — and no doubt TouchDesigner will be used heavily!
Follow Brendan Dawes Website | Instagram | Vimeo
