Living Up to the Hype

Hitchcock films, DJing and the legend of Pandora's Box are among sources of inspiration for Brendan Dawes's digital art. The artist sheds light on his journey from factory worker to NFT art collector favourite

- Aaina Bhargava

In the early 1980s, Brendan Dawes's grandfather gave him a tiny computer. While he couldn't do much on it compared to today's advanced computers, "it forced me to learn how to code and program to make it do something", Dawes recalls. "I was fascinated; I could type words into this black box and have it make things." He first used his newfound coding powers for evil rather than good, in the form of a prank. He went into a branch of electronics store Dixon's, where they had several ZX81 computers each joined up to a TV, and quickly reprogrammed each one to infinitely repeat "Dixons is sh*t" across the screen. "I guess that moment taught me how powerful code could be."

Thus began the much sought-after British digital artist's passion for technology and design. Dawes first started creating NFTs in June 2020; when he uploaded his first piece, passionate NFT collector WhaleShark snapped it up within the hour. "Brendan is one of my favourite artists in the [NFT] space," said WhaleShark on an episode of Tatler TV: Meta Versed, Tatler's live-streamed series on all things metaverse. The collector, who has amassed a staggering collection of more than 400,000 NFTs, describes Dawes as a "force of nature" because of his alluring, colourful aesthetic and his ability to capture our digital interactions. In particular, the artist accomplishes this by building algorithms that visualize data created during everyday life.