Visualising accents
“People know the Bristolian accent as soon as they hear it. Now, for the first time, we’ve discovered what it actually looks like”
View Art Gallery has been given the privilege of being chosen by M & C Saatchi to celebrate the launch of Everything Everywhere’s 4G network roll out across the UK. As part of this activity, EE have engaged world-renowned digital artist Brendan Dawes, to create bespoke artworks for each of the 10 cities the network was initially launched in.
The inspiration behind Dawes’ innovative work was the various Twitter conversations, which occurred within each individual city around the time of the 4G launch. The topics captured covered music, TV, education, culture, weather, sport, politics, film and music. His intention was to dig deeper into the subjects that affect how people communicate in the city and what they talked about when online.
Within this extraordinary work, each chosen topic, and the hundreds of thousands of digital conversations associated with them, are represented by a specific colour coded keyword. From the keywords at the bottom of the artwork, a series of lines flare out to form a myriad of coloured interlinked circles. The thickness of the lines and the size and brightness of the circles represent the popularity of each topic and the frequency at which people were speaking about them.
The beauty behind this idea is how intensely personal Dawes’ work is to Bristol. Every section, mark and line has been inspired by something said, done, achieved, intended, challenged, thought and written about within our vibrant city. This fits perfectly within the concept for our True Identity? exhibition, in which Dawes’ work will be featured. This digital portrait focuses not simply on the identity of one person, but the identity of Bristol itself. By mapping out which topics have inspired people to talk and write about online, Dawes has documented Bristol’s interests and what constitutes them.
Innovative, playful and curious, Dawes’ work is a wonderful vision of our dynamic city.