Past Episodes.
S1E9.
“Complaceny is the C-word.”
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Brendan Dawes: on the edge of oblivion.
Published: Mar 1, 2025.
“I always knew I wasn’t going to have a normal job. I knew that at school. I just felt different, I thought, I’m not going to have a nine-to-five job.”
INTRODUCTION: Without doubt, Punk’s defiance was a rejection of the polished, corporate world, and challenged many of society’s ordinary expectations.
It was raw and loud, built on the belief that anyone could pick up a guitar and make something that mattered.
Then as post-punk bloomed into electro-pop – dance music, and Acid House emerged from the clubs.
Swapping drum machines for guitars and hypnotic loops for three-chord anthems, it was no longer just about sound; it was about breaking the system.
Then, as the ’90s took hold, Madchester’s swagger and manipulated breakbeats rewired culture, and the rave scene was born.
Bands like Happy Mondays and A Guy Called Gerald dominated. The underground was no longer just physical; it was digital. Personal computers, the internet, algorithms.
Art wasn’t just something to make; it was something to generate. The tools of rebellion had changed, but the energy remained the same.
By the 2000s, creativity was becoming inseparable from code. Artists were using algorithms to shape visuals, and data to create experiences.
Then came the blockchain, decentralized and untethered, shifting control from institutions to creators.
NFTs quickly followed, turning digital works into tradable assets, built from randomness and human intent; they pushed the limits of what creativity could be.
In episode 9, we meet someone who has spent a lifetime riding these cultural waves, from punk to code, from dance floors to data streams, always pushing creativity into the unknown.
“I’ve had a lovely life. I always like the phrase, ‘luck has to find you working.’ I often think back—what if I had just gone for my meat and potato pie, sat in the car, and moaned instead?”
RICHARD SMITH: The use of technology to reimagine art and culture was always on the periphery of punk, yet punk’s do-it-yourself attitude inspired multiple generations to leverage technology’s power to compose and create.
At the end of the late 80s, under the influence of Acid House, my guest today was kicking around a small coastal town just north of Liverpool called Southport. Not knowing what to do with his life, his early love of video games, computers, and breakbeats brought him to where he is now.
He is an artist, and the piece he created, titled The Pandora Variations, was one of the first NFTs to be sold at auction by Sotheby’s. And most recently, his groundbreaking collaboration on the film Eno, directed by Gary Hustwit, is already looking Oscar-worthy, which, if you’ve not seen it, is very well deserved.
Please welcome to the show, Mr. Brendan Dawes. Brendan, welcome. Very happy you made time to be here today.
BRENDAN DAWES: Oh, thank you, Richard. That was a lovely introduction, and thanks.
RS: So, as I said, you grew up in Southport, and that’s where you live now, north of Liverpool. Growing up, you were influenced by computers and video games. You left school at 16 and didn’t really know what you wanted to do.
“It taught me the power of things very early on—that you could have command of them.”
Just talk to me about your childhood a little bit—the influence of computers and your love of video games.
BD: Well, it’s always interesting to me how the context of your environment influences you. Maybe you only realize that later. Because I lived in a seaside town with tourists, in the late seventies and early eighties, we had video game arcades.
Every weekend, I would spend all my time at video arcades. There was one, which weirdly was in the basement of a hotel. Because it was in a basement, it was dark, and they had all these ultraviolet lights in there. It was just like another world. Outside was this Victorian seaside town, and then you’re in this thing, and you’re like, wow, this is futuristic.
RS: It’s almost like Tron.
BD: Tron, War Games, things like that. Those were the films around at the time. So yeah, they really influenced me. But it was the experience of it. I thought, wow, this is really empowering and just very inspirational. It wasn’t my normal life.
Then I got a Sinclair ZX81 computer. My granddad bought it for me. You plugged it into your TV, and it came with a book about the programming language BASIC. You plugged it in, and it just had this cursor blinking at you.
That was it. There was no graphical interface. So, it forced you to learn how to program with it.
So, that’s what I did. And for some reason, I just connected with it. It all seemed to make sense to me.
RS: The interface is very similar to the movie War Games, right?
BD: There’s no mouse or anything like that. It didn’t have sound. It was white, so you had to be very inventive. You could make games on it, but you really had to be creative about how you did it. So that’s what I did, and I just taught myself how to code.
RS: How did it inspire you?
BD: You had control. You weren’t consuming, you were creating. And that was a huge deal. Now, we’re mostly consumers of stuff. But back then, I wanted to be able to make my own things. I was fascinated with the possibilities, even though you couldn’t really do much with it. Constraints are always good in creativity.
There used to be a shop called Dixon’s, a computer shop. They would have these ZX81s lined up, hooked up to TVs. I would go in, and you could write a program within seconds—just three lines—and you’d put loads of swear words on the screen. It would just scroll up and down infinitely.
RS: I love that. You go into this electronics shop, and you’re being mischievous and devious, using this new computer to do all this stuff. And probably nobody knew how to turn it off.
BD: Well, they didn’t. That was the thing. They didn’t know how to shut it off, so I’d have it saying “bollocks” or whatever, and it was just funny. I wasn’t ever going to steal anything. To me, it was kind of an early form of digital graffiti.
RS: That must have been brilliant.
BD: I guess it taught me the power of these things very early on—that you could have command of them.
RS: I want to unpack a little bit about your love of music. I want to understand how that was motivating you and what was inspiring you.
BD: I was trying to think about your podcast and how it relates. In ’75, I was nine, so I started to get into music more in the early eighties.
New Romantic, all kinds of stuff. But I really got into it when I got into the whole rave scene in Manchester because I started a sound engineering course in the late eighties.
RS: Sound engineering as in music production?
BD: Yeah. I went and did a sound recording course in Manchester at Eric Recording Studios. In the same class was Graham Massey, who went on to form 808 State.
“My heroes were Steinski and the Mass Media, Coldcut, Eric B., and all these people who used samples and bits of vinyl to make new things.”
I was really into mixing—vinyl mixes and stuff. My heroes were Steinski and the Mass Media, Coldcut, Eric B., and all these people who used samples and bits of vinyl to make new things. Again, these things existed, and then you manipulated them to create something new.
With Acid House, it was a digital sound, but they used an MC-202 from Roland. I had one of those. I think I had an MC-303, and the 303 was like the Acid House machine.
So, all that “beep, beep, beep, beep” sound came from that. I bought one secondhand, and I was like, this is amazing. I’m doing all this, trying to make these tunes. All these parts are starting to come together.
RS: What brought you to that point—wanting to be a recording engineer?
BD: Well, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I left school at 16. I always went to school, but I didn’t really enjoy it. The best class for me was art, but I left school with pretty much no qualifications.
I was a photographer for a couple of years, doing news photography, a bit of sports as well, that kind of stuff. But I didn’t feel it was my thing.
Then I saw a sound engineering course, and I thought I’d go for that because it just sounded fun and experimental and a bit different.
“You had control. You weren’t consuming, you were creating. And that was a huge deal. Now, we’re mostly consumers of stuff.”
I always knew I wasn’t going to have a normal job. I knew that at school. I just felt different, but I thought, I’m not going to have a nine-to-five job.
I got into music because you could buy the Atari ST, and it had MIDI ports. That was the music computer. I started messing around with music and sound. I’d already been a DJ, making my own mixes and selling them illegally, making breakbeat albums for a record company in London.
RS: Really?
BD: I would go around vinyl record shops and find obscure breakbeats.
RS: I remember my brother telling me about the phenomenon, and I thought, people buy records like that? It makes no sense to me.
BD: I would compile these breakbeat albums, but I was using tape. I didn’t even have a sampler. I remember using Ampex quarter-inch tape, recording the loop multiple times, and then splicing it together manually. I sent the tape down to the record label, and the guy who owned it rang me up and said, “Brendan, you know you can buy a sampler?”
I told him I couldn’t afford one. He said, “There’s nothing wrong with it. You can’t tell—it’s beautifully done—but how long does it take?” I said, “Fucking hours.”
I started getting more equipment and got into sequencing with computers, making dance music. I took a cassette into 3 Beat Music in Liverpool, which was a record shop but also had a label. At the time, I was working in a factory because I was getting married—I was drilling holes in fiberglass in an electronics factory.
RS: Your backstory is fascinating.
BD: Listen, let me tell you, I’ve had a lovely life. I always like the phrase, “luck has to find you working.” I often think back—what if I had just gone for my meat and potato pie, sat in the car, and moaned instead?
RS: I love that.
“I thought, well, if I’m going to be on stage, I need someone else with me. My brother was massively into E’s and drugs and everything, so I said, ‘Do you want to stand on stage with me?’ And he said, ‘Yeah’.”
BD: So yeah, I took this cassette in, thinking they were never going to ring me. But they rang that week. The following week, they said, “Come in and talk to us. We want to release a couple of singles.”
I thought, wow, this is it, this is it. I’ve made it. They released a couple of 12-inch singles, and my brother and I played a club that would then become Cream—before Cream was even a thing.
I thought, well, if I’m going to be on stage, I need someone else with me. My brother was massively into E’s and drugs and everything, so I said, “Do you want to stand on stage with me?” And he said, “Yeah.” So, he pretended to play the keyboard. The whole thing was a PA; it was all on tape. But that was fun, and I made about 400 quid.
RS: You went from wanting to be a musician, making music, and then the computer elements of music-making inspired you to move to the next stage, whatever that was.
BD: I think that’s the commonality. The computer was like this amazing box where I could make creative things. I always wanted to make stuff in some form. Back then, it was music because I’d done this sound engineering course and learned how to use machines. But with computers, I thought, this is an amazing thing where you could type into it and make it do things. I don’t know why, but it just spoke to me. It just made sense to me—how you make decisions and loops and things.
RS: What’s interesting is that, as you got into music, there’s a journey starting in ’75, going into the early eighties, then house music, Acid House, and techno. In many ways, music was the thing that spurred one movement into the next.
BD: Yeah, and I wasn’t trained in programming. I wasn’t a musician. I didn’t even have qualifications—I didn’t go to university. So even though I was too young for the whole punk thing, I still looked to that whole aesthetic, that whole manifesto behind it. The idea of punk.
But my execution of it eventually took the form of code, and the power that gave me—the ability to control this box. That’s maybe the correlation.
The message of the podcast is that you don’t have to follow the rules. It’s not just about having a successful career—not in terms of money—but being creatively successful, fulfilled, or whatever that means.
If I look back on my career, I think there are a few commonalities. One of them is that I was always using what Duchamp might call ready-mades. Back then, it was samples. My influences were Coldcut, Steinski, and people like that.
That’s why I was looking for these breakbeats. I was using things that already existed and twisting them into different forms, which is what you did as a mix DJ, a scratch DJ, or when you put records together from samples. And I think that’s what I’m still doing now.
“The computer was like this amazing box where I could make creative things. I always wanted to make stuff in some form.”
I just use code now, and a lot of it is visual. The Eno film is very much that—it’s footage, but then we scramble it all and put it together in different ways. There are also generative scenes that are all generated in real-time. But again, it’s all about taking existing things and looking at them in a different way.
RS: What I like a lot about what you’re saying is that one, there’s a connection, and two, you’re very passionate about it. It feels like it was fuel for you.
BD: I think it’s a subconscious thing as well. Most of the work I’ve made—even taking data and representing it in different ways—is rooted in that idea. To me, that’s a very punk thing. But that comes from my music background, the idea of sound.
Because I always say, “Data by itself is not enough. Data needs poetry.”
What I mean by that is that I’m looking for the in-between things—the things that resonate with people. This unknown quantity, this X factor, this fuzziness. The slightly messy bits, the cracks in the concrete, whatever it is. Those are the interesting things—the space between the notes.
I wanted to try and do that with data, and that made a name for me. I got a lot of work because of it.
RS: I know you’ve been flying all over the world, promoting the Eno film and talking about its creation. For me, it’s a truly remarkable work of art.
I’m curious—how did the film come about?
BD: I first met Gary at a South by Southwest conference panel. A friend of ours, Jim Coudal, who’s one of the creators of the Field Note notebooks, he invited me onto this panel, and I went over to Austin, Texas and I met Gary for the first time.
We were on this panel and, talking about creativity and all that kind of stuff. We just became friends from then on. Over the years, we’ve always wanted to work on something together.
“I always say, ‘Data by itself is not enough. Data needs poetry’.”
Some things we’ve kicked around, but never really manifested anything and, we’ve always been talking and, in 2019, in January, Gary emailed me, he had this idea for a film that is different every time it’s shown. So, using a generative process, created with software.
Would I be interested in working on it? I just emailed back and said, “Sounds amazing.” So, we then started on making a prototype. Brian Eno’s name wasn’t mentioned at all at this point. We started to use as a kind of demo. Gary’s previous film was about the designer Dieter Rams.
So, we had all that footage and I started building this system that created this movie on the fly, compositing things, and all kinds of stuff.
RS: You’ve been making films or moving imagery or however you want to describe it for a while before that, correct? Was Gary familiar with that?
BD: Oh, yeah. That’s why he was interested in working with me. He loves a lot of my previous work and weirdly, a lot of my previous stuff has been informed or inspired by films and cinema.
The first work I got into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was shown in 2008, was this thing called Cinema Redux. It’s a still image, and it shows an entire film in one image. Each row is 60 frames, then it builds all these rows up of little images, little thumbnails. Which I created in 2004, just playing around.
Then MoMa got in touch in 2007 and said, “Oh, we’ve seen this work on the internet, we’ve got this exhibition called Design in the Elastic Mind, opening in 2008 and we’d like to feature this work”.
That obviously blew my mind because, I’d never been to art school. I didn’t have any connection with anyone at MoMa. It shows the power of the internet and putting your work out there. Just doing stuff, making stuff. Gary had seen that, and he knew my other work. Long story short, because Brian had done the soundtrack to his Dieter Rams film, he knew he had a bit of an in with Brian.
RS: As you mentioned, it’s a generative film. Explain that a little bit to me, how that works
BD: So, there’s pre-edited scenes, and we pin scenes. So, the beginning and the end are the same, but then the rest is chosen by the system, but we can also impose a narrative arc.
So, it’s not like complete chaos or randomness, we’re giving it an emotional compass as it were, so that was the hard stuff to figure out, how to do that. Because people watch it and think it’s just going to be a load of random clips, and it’s not. Then, there’s millions and millions of permutations.
RS: I remember growing up, I used to love those books called Rock Family History. I guess where this is coming from is that notion that everything is connected. It’s such a sprawling mass.
I think the film that you and Gary have made, it’s almost like a visualization of that sprawling mass.
BD: When Gary approached him originally, he turned Gary down because he didn’t want to make a documentary about his life. He said there’s more than one truth about someone and he hated documentaries that present one idea.
When Gary came to me it was just the idea of a film that is never the same twice. That was the thing we were working on. Then we did a prototype, and we took it to Brian and he said, this is what we’re thinking, and Brian was like, “Yeah, this is really cool. Let’s do it.”
Obviously, Brian is the perfect subject for a documentary that is generative. That’s the thing that people love. It shows different aspects of Brian every time you go and see it.
You might get Roxy Music, but you might get the art school. You might not. You might get ambient music. You might not get ambient music. You might get all these light sculptures, you might not.
It is an optimistic film, and it talks about climate change as well at the end. Because the beginning and the end are the same. It’s very inspirational about creativity and art and why we have art in our lives.
So, people love it for that. The reaction to the film has been beyond our expectations. It’s all a bit mad really, I remember being told we got into Sundance. I was like, I’ve still got to make this thing.
There was a crucial moment where, I got it to a certain level. Then Gary was like, can you come out to New York for a week to work with us? Me and the two editors? It’d be good to have you in the same room.
I went out there for four or five days and during this screening as well, and I watched the screening and I came out and they were quite joyous about it, and Maya, one of the editors said, “What do you think, Brendan?”
We were on the street and fucking freezing cold, in upstate New York. And she goes, “What do you think?” I said, “I think I’ve just watched something where there’s no evidence that I’ve worked on it.”
She was like, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, it’s not generative.”
So, then I couldn’t sleep that night and we went back to the office the next day so I then I had to rant about it. We had the poster behind us, and it says, “a generative documentary.” And I said, “It fucking says generative, this is what we’re making.”
Gary, he wished he’d filmed all this as it galvanized the vision, the idea of the movie, that it needed to be made with software. That was the whole point of it. It couldn’t be a lie. So, when I was leaving, I was like, “Has it been worth me coming over?” Gary said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
RS: At that point how was it constructed?
BD: I had built the software, but there was still a few problems with it. So, Gary had put a cut together. That was done in Premiere, it was edited. That’s what was screened. I didn’t know this.
So, we watched this film, I think he told me just before we screened it. I was like, “Fucking, what?” I’d just made this software but it, it had been cut together in Premiere and I was like, what?
So that really like messed with my head. That’s why I said what I said when we came out of cinema.
RS: It sounds like that was like a pivotal moment.
“Gary emailed me, he had this idea for a film that is different every time it’s shown. Would I be interested in working on it? I just emailed back and said, ‘Sounds amazing’.”
BD: It absolutely was, it really was, Gary still talks about it. Me, and the editors, we’re such great friends, and that was the thing, I had to learn how to work with the editors, from their point of view, because they edited these, all these individual scenes that are fucking amazing.
It’s been a gift, the whole thing. going around the world, doing it live or doing Q&A’s and, you know, Sundance was incredible.
RS: I want to go back to one thing, the influence of punk. I was thinking about what you’re doing currently, the Eno film, and here’s somebody who’s always been at the forefront of music and challenging musicians to work differently. So it’s interesting that you are continuing to enable that journey.
BD: There was something that Brian said when he was talking about his Roxy Music days. It was an interview when he was at art school and stuff and he was saying that in this Roxy Music time he moved from the element of skill to the element of judgment.
So, he realized that he wasn’t a great musician, but what he could do. He could twiddle all these things and he could judge whether it was good or, it sounded interesting, at least.
There was like this old interview where he wore a tie dye thing, and he describes tie dye as bad dyeing. It’s like, he realized, he said, he’s made a career out of failing well, So when I was watching all this, particularly the skill versus judgment thing, it made a lot of sense to me.
Because there are way more talented programmers than me but the ability that I have is to be able to judge it, to make something interesting where a lot of coders and programmers, they just get into the real geekery of it, or then the output doesn’t resonate, and a lot of the stuff I do is so simple.
Whether it’s from punk or that idea of not worrying about the rules and making your own rules and blowing things up. I think there’s more interesting things happen when you’re on the edge of oblivion.
You’re on the edge, you know destroying things. I think that’s where you should always be as an artist. I always describe it as there’s the things you know, and outside of that are the much bigger things, you don’t know. I believe, you should place yourself, as an artist, on that event horizon, between the two.
You shouldn’t be like in the middle of all the things because that’s boring. That’s why I don’t get why some artists, particularly in the digital sphere, they just bang out the same stuff.
“I’d never been to art school. I didn’t have any connection with anyone at MoMa. It shows the power of the internet and putting your work out there.”
I get it because it makes them money and it’s easier. For me, I’ve always found that a bit boring and I just don’t want to do that, so I’m just constantly looking to do new things or work in new mediums or work with new people so that’s what interests me.
RS: You describe yourself as an artist, but in the digital sense or you don’t even qualify it in that way?
BD: It’s such a loaded word. We always have a problem with the word artist, so I thought, I’m a designer.
But I think design, the word designer suggests that you’re solving problems. I’m providing answers. I don’t think I’m providing answers. Nor do I want to leave people with more questions. So it feels to me that what I do is more art led because no one employs me to design a logo or whatever.
So, I just embrace it now, because, like I said, it’s quite loaded. You’re at like a family party and someone goes, “What do you do?” And I used to go, “Oh, I make things.” Now I just go, “I’m an artist,” and then just wait for the silence. Or they’d like, “You’re unemployed, then are you?
RS: “Would you like some more Brussels sprouts?”
BD: Exactly. Get me away from this weirdo. So, I don’t even qualify anymore.
RS: I know you sold some stuff in Sotheby’s, is that right?
BD: I’ve done a couple of Sotheby’s auctions, a couple of Christie’s, various other auctions. I got well into the NFT scene in 2021, it changed a lot of things for me, which was amazing. The first NFT sold in an auction house in Paris was mine, and first NFT sold in an auction house in China was mine.
I had made this abstract sculpture from the fight scene at the end of Kill Bill Volume 1, so again, manipulating movies and things, and it was called Black Mamba’s Revenge, and it was bought in an hour.
Obviously NFTs was a whole phenomenon and people are saying that they’re dead and yet they are still being sold, and collected. Not in the same way but what was interesting for me was it then got me in front of contemporary art galleries, who already had digital artists, and a gallery in Mayfair called Gazelli Art House, they got in touch.
I did a group show with them and then they said, “Oh, we want to represent you.” So, I’ve done various shows with them, and they look after my work now. They’re like a family to me and they’re amazing. They’re a full-on contemporary art gallery. So, it opened, a lot of doors for me.
RS: As you’re talking, I’m thinking, outside of the coding aspect, the technology aspect; which seems like a means to the end. What would you say your art is all about? What are you trying to say?
BD: I want it to resonate. Here’s the thing, I don’t think the work is completed, if it’s ever completed, it’s not finished until someone sees it, and experiences it. So that completes the loop. If no one sees the work, I don’t think the work actually exists.
RS: It’s that context thing.
BD: For me, it’s a conduit, it’s a lens to look at the world in a different way, and to just stop and question things. The best comments I’ve had there was one guy who said, “This completely stopped me in my tracks,” I thought job done. But I’m not thinking of that when I’m making it.
I’m just making because it’s the only thing I know how to do. But when someone says that it means a lot, or it made them cry. Lots of people have seen the Eno film and they’ve been in tears watching it.
That’s obviously because of Brian and what he’s saying and all that. But you make this work and if it doesn’t resonate with someone, I think its failed, and if people hate it, I don’t think I ever want to make work that people go, “Yeah, it’s all right.”
You want it to be extremes like, “Fuck me. I hate that work, or, “Wow. I really like it.” I don’t just want to make an Instagram like making machine. Some people just do. I’m not interested in that shit.
I think it’s hard to describe sometimes why you do what you do.
“We were on the street and fucking freezing cold, in upstate New York. And she goes, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I think I’ve just watched something where there’s no evidence that I’ve worked on it’.”
RS: For me, I’ve always thought that it comes from wanting to have a voice. Wanting to be a little subversive. I think that’s where punk really had an impact on me because it legitimized a little bit your ability to take on the establishment.
I never put myself out there. I didn’t really dress like a punk. I didn’t really do all of that. All that inspiration led me to what I do. Cause it gave me a way to express myself, starting out as a designer I thought, “Oh yeah, I can now have a voice.”
Sorry. That was like a confession.
BD: I think that’s really interesting. I think creating anything is an egotistical act because you’re essentially, you’re like God in your own environment. Whether the environment is a piece of paper or whatever.
I always felt, that’s what that is. So, when people say, I really like that, it’s a hell of a thing. It’s a thing you’ve created from nothing. And now it deserves a place in the world. And oftentimes I think you’re creating work that doesn’t exist in any other form. So therefore, you feel you need to make it exist.
I know with Gary as well he wanted to make films that he wanted to watch, but they didn’t exist. So that’s why he made Helvetica and God knows what. So, I guess it’s a similar thing.
I’m just reading Nick Cave’s book at the minute. Which is incredible. There’s a lot of things in there, about his journey and creativity and stuff, but I just find all those conversations really interesting,
RS: Something you also touched on; you met Gary at South by Southwest. But, when I look at some of your work, there’s a lot of familiarity with existing work and the Eno film. Is that where a lot of the inspiration came from?
BD: Well, it’s weird, recently, I think I posted it on Instagram yesterday about this thing I made, in 1998, where you could re-edit the shower scene in Psycho.
So, I have only recently realized that it was like an early prototype in a way. I was massive, still am obviously, a massive Alfred Hitchcock fan and back then I was trying to make a name for myself. In web design and stuff like that and interaction design.
I’d done a site about Saul Bass, and I did the first ever Saul Bass website, unofficially, and that got a lot of press. An offshoot of that was this Psycho thing, this online application where you could re-edit the shower scene and then you could save your own version.
It was quite disturbing how people titled them. One was like, Die Bitch. I think some people were obviously a bit disturbed. But anyway. It was a timeline, and you could drop things in a timeline and it would generate this thing and it was only recently that I thought bloody hell, I forgot that I’d made that, that long ago.
Back then I made a lot of interface things and that was what I was known for, weird interfaces and just things that didn’t look like anything else. So, I guess I’ve always seen the idea of software applications in an artful way anyway, because to me, why can’t they be artworks? Why can’t software that you’ve made be a piece of art?
I didn’t think of it like that back then but that was my outlet for making things. I always say, “You make a thing to make a thing. You’re not making a thing. You’re making a thing that makes a thing.” Which is the whole point of generative work. I’ve always done that. There are all these little connections, with what I’m doing now from way back.
RS: You strike me as somebody who’s not afraid of failure, or you’re not afraid of imperfection, or you just want to see what happens.
BD: You could say that if you watch a Kubrick movie, and I was watching 2001 again the other day, and you look at that movie and God, it’s like how did they even film this and it’s a perfect science fiction film. But I’m sure if Kubrick looked at it, he’d go, “Nah, that bit it’s not right.” I’m sure that’s how it was.
So, you aim for perfection, but you always want these things that have these little cracks in them. I think that’s what defines a bit of humanity in the work. You want that little bit of naivety in it.
That’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in. The whole point about, being on the edge. There’s the things you know, and then the other side of that are the things you don’t know, which is huge and infinite and you want to position yourself between those two things. You don’t want to be right in the middle of the things you know, because that’s boring.
You want to be always on the edge of that. Unfamiliarity, that’s where you want to position yourself as an artist. I don’t think as any creative person, that’s what fuels you. What if I do this?
It could be terrible and it could blow your computer up or whatever it is, or it could be a disastrous business fail. But you must give it a go. Cause its way more interesting. This idea of, oblivion.
Making a generative system where you’re making a system where you have rules and then you press a button, and then the system makes itself. There’s a vulnerability to that.
You’re putting yourself in a vulnerable position because you’re not quite sure what it’s going to make. You put the rules in place like a kind of mini god, but it still could go different places and I love that aspect.
I think it speaks to that idea of, the tension between oblivion and success.
RS: It’s amazing how, your life has been this series of stumbles and falls, but somehow, you have always gotten where you wanted to go, making a name for yourself.
“There are way more talented programmers than me but the ability that I have is to be able to judge it, to make something interesting.”
BD: I think the main thing is being adaptive to the culture and the times. One thing, and I’ve only realized this recently. You’ve got to adapt. That’s what Darwin said. It’s not about survival of the fittest. It’s about those that can adapt to the surroundings. They’re the ones that survive.
I’ve always managed to find a way to adapt to my surroundings, culturally, technology, society, whatever. I’ve always managed to find a way to understand what the zeitgeist is, somehow. Which is weird because I don’t live in London and I’m miles from anywhere like that.
That’s the number one lesson I’ve learned in my life is to adapt. Cause if you don’t, you become like stone and you just refuse to change I’ve just learned to adapt to the times, and now it’s AI and stuff.
The discussion around AI for instance. You see a lot that it just steals people’s work. But that’s a very naive reaction to it. We can’t discount AI completely and we shouldn’t because it’s another tool that can lead to areas that we’ve not even thought of.
I think that’s what we need to hold on to. There’s lots of concerns, absolutely. But you don’t want to discount it. I think there’s a lot of creatives and artists who really do get it and see that it’s a new form of creativity and I think it’s best when it’s combined with human beings.
The way I use it, I’m creating like the forms of a thing myself, but then I’m using AI to then augment it but it cannot make what I’ve seen without me. That first bit. I’m still crafting everything, it’s not like going in some magic porridge pot. I’m still having to figure out how it does that That, for me, that’s absolutely fascinating,
It’s a new form of beauty.
RS: I was curious what’s next for you and just as you were talking, it made me think, you’ve obviously had this crazy year with the film and, obviously that’s taking you here, there and everywhere.
I don’t even know if you think in those terms of what’s next,
BD: Practically what’s next, me and Gary have started our own company to do other film projects. We’ve already got the next one lined up, but that is not our project. We’re consulting on it, we go to New York in January, for a workshop on that and then a couple of other big projects, that are very exciting. Could be huge. We’ll see where that goes.
Then there’s the other side. I’m represented by a gallery in London, Gazelli Art House, Mila, who owns the gallery, had not seen the film before, and she came, and she was blown away.
Then another art guy was there and, they were both saying to me, where does this leave you though? As your art practice. Are you just going to be you and Gary now? No, no, I just see this as another element to what I do. I’m still exploring, making things, probably going to do a new solo show next year.
I’m working on ideas for that. But honestly, I don’t really know where it’s going to go. I think I’m just trying to learn all the time. I think of new things and new inputs
RS: Coming back to what you said a minute ago, this is what you do. This is what makes you happy or gets you excited or what motivates you and, in many ways, you’re continuing to do more of the same.
BD: I want to make work that is remembered and leaves a mark. Not everything I do does that. Even David Bowie did The Laughing Gnome. You make lots of shitty things then hopefully you then make something significant.
That’s what’s been the true joy with this film. So those are the things that keep me going,
RS: It seems that you get a lot from people’s interpretations or the fact that you put it out there and it gives it meaning. I love that.
BD: It also they bring something else to. Or it resonates in a way that I didn’t expect. That’s the best thing,
“The first NFT sold in an auction house in Paris was mine, and the first NFT sold in an auction house in China was mine.”
RS: You mentioned Marcel Duchamp. To me, that is everything. Is it a work of art, is a urinal a work of art? It’s an example that I try to express to everybody I work with. Coming from an agency, advertising agency, branding agency world, everyone is afraid. It’s always about, What you shouldn’t do or will the client be happy. Sometimes it’s just like let’s just do it. Let’s just see what happens,
BD: There’s a piece in the Eno film where Brian talks about that piece in particular. The idea of his ready mades. These things that already exist and how you can take those and put them in other artworks and make new things from them. When I was making breakbeats and all that kind of stuff. I didn’t know you could term those as ready made.
So, I realized there was a correlation with the ethos of Marcel Duchamp and all the whole absurdity of Dadaism and all that kind of stuff. Dadaism came out of the response to the horrors of the first world war.
“I don’t think the work is completed, if it’s ever completed, it’s not finished until someone sees it, and experiences it. So that completes the loop. If no one sees the work, I don’t think the work actually exists.”
The reason it’s absurd is because of that. Those things have just always interested me. I’m not interested in the familiar. I think you should always make a stranger of familiarity. You know, when I did the Cinema Redux thing that got into MoMa, you know what, I could just bang those out forever.
And ditto with a lot of my work, I could just make it into a template. And just bang that shit out. And I have no interest in doing that.
I want to make new things. Different things. But there’s a lot of artists that they actually do that. They make money and they get collected and it’s just so boring.
Because they’ve just become familiar with things. They’re familiar with their own processes. They’re not trying new things, because of complacency. Complacency is the C word. It’s a horrible thing and once complacency sets in, it’s game over.
When I do like talks at universities and stuff, I always say, “You’ve got to deviate from the expected.” When you do that, it’s like having some punks swear on Nationwide. It’s still being talked about now. That’s why you should never follow trends because you’re just following everyone else and you’re just standing in the noise and you don’t stick out. So, I’ve never followed trends at all.
It’s good to deviate from the everyday and the expected,
RS: Something, you mentioned, you said that you’d worked with Peter Saville?
BD: That was when Peter was creative director of Manchester. So, the agency I was with at the time, they were doing a massive rebrand and, so we had a lot of meetings with Peter, where we’d show him the idea for the website and stuff like that. He often commented on the typography choice and that kind of thing.
But as he said, to you, he’s not into technology. He doesn’t use technology. So, he found it all quite, as he’s described it, quite quaint.
I also worked with Tony Wilson as well. He rang me up once and he said, “Brendan, what would it sound like if you could hear the Happy Mondays being downloaded?”
I said, “Well,” he said, “Could you make some code to do it?” So, I made this quick little software application where you could put any song in, but in this case, it was the Happy Mondays. I can’t remember which one it was, but you heard the code version of it.
“You always want these things that have these little cracks in them. I think that’s what defines a bit of humanity in the work. You want that little bit of naivety in it.”
That’s what Tony did, because he was clever. He didn’t have any of the rights to the Happy Mondays’ songs, so I created this piece. And that’s what Tony did. He just gave you dangerous ideas.
I think that’s what Gary did. When Gary emailed me, it was a dangerous idea. How do you make a film that’s never the same again? These people are amazing, to have in your lives, they just drop these ideas on you, and, you can either say no, or you can say, “Yeah, I think I can figure something out.”
RS: I feel like I could keep chatting forever, but I’m going to let you go, cause I know it’s getting late for you and it’s probably getting close to dinner time.
But Brendan, thank you so much for making time again, and like I said, I know you’ve been super busy. I wish you luck with so many of these things.
BD: You know next week. I’m actually doing a podcast interview, a video, and it’s about Savile Row tailoring.
RS: What?
BD: Yeah, because that’s the kind of stuff that I wear.
RS: That’s so interesting. Wow. Brilliant.
BD: I want to be known for dressing well and stuff and I’ve managed to do that so much that I’ve now been invited on to be interviewed.
RS: You just blew my mind with that. That was wow. Wow! I’ve got to see these,Savile Row pictures. That’s brilliant.
BD: You know, I appreciate craft in all its forms.
RS: Totally. I can tell that. It’s brilliant and I’m pretty honored that you are on the show so thank you.
BD: Well, listen, I’m honored to be on the show. Right from episode one, I loved what you were doing and, the Peter Savile episode is fantastic so, to be asked to be on it is a real thrill. So, thank you again.
RS: Well, I’m hoping that it achieves greatness like yourself,
BD: I’m sure it will.
RS: All right. Thank you.
BD: Thanks, Richard. Cheers, matey. Bye.