Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

The Art of Transactions

Organic digital structures born from payment transaction data

Commissioned by Adyen, The Art of Transactions takes anonymous payment transaction data and creates organic digital structures born from the data characteristics of each payment.

With this piece I asked myself what if you could peer inside this system and see payments being added to the network. Rather than create some kind of representation of networks I instead wanted to create a world where these delicate moments seemed to float down into the network and suggest they are almost delicate in nature. Each representation is constructed from various parts of the data — the shape is born from the transaction category / vertical whilst the texture is derived from the type of device that was used. The colour is then informed by where in the world the payment took place.

As the final piece took shape I was reminded of ancient Japanese prints or hand-drawn collections of flowers you might find in a botanist's journal. What I wasn't reminded of was what we normally thing of as data, networks or computers, asking what can or should data look like?