Code & Canvas: Reimaging Art in the Digital Age with Brent Watanabe

This past Friday, MacDowell was honored to welcome interdisciplinary artist Brent Watanabe (’11, ’13, ’16, ’25) was the featured speaker for October’s MacDowell Downtown. Watanabe has spent nearly two decades developing what he describes as "computer-controlled installations"—works that merge traditional mediums such as drawing and sculpture with custom-built software, electronics, and immersive audiovisual components.

His projects often feature interconnected systems, including sculptural elements, video game engines, projections, and kinetic objects, forming durational installations with no clear beginning or end. At the heart of much of his work is a recurring exploration of animal imagery navigating or reacting to human-made environments, grappling with themes of consumption, waste, and psychological tension.

During his current residency at MacDowell, Watanabe has been working in a stream-of-consciousness style, drawing from a familiar vocabulary of characters, themes, and settings that recur throughout his body of work. His creative approach is deeply influenced by fables, cartoons from childhood, musical composition, and psychology. While trained as a painter—despite challenges such as colorblindness—his path led him toward more experimental practices, beginning with the vibrant underground art scene in 1990s Seattle, where he produced hundreds of posters and graphics for local bands. That early experience laid the groundwork for his evolution into immersive, responsive installation work.

Watanabe's site-specific projects have taken shape in a wide range of settings, from abandoned gas stations to art galleries and festivals like Bumbershoot. These installations incorporate a diverse range of media and techniques, including Morse code transmissions, live police radio feeds, Pepper’s Ghost illusions, and projection-mapped simulations. His systems are often populated by interdependent characters and dynamic environments, all running in real time. Through these intricately designed ecosystems, Watanabe invites audiences into unsettling yet compelling narratives that blur the line between the virtual and the physical, offering a haunting reflection of contemporary life.

To discover more of Brent Watanabe's work, visit his website.