Brendan Brown(bear) is an American artist and researcher born in Kansas, based in Ghent. He graduated with a degree in Autonomous Design from KASK & Conservatorium in 2023, and works at the intersection of research-driven practice and art — deconstructing technical systems to open them up rather than explain them away.
His work reaches toward the supernatural image, combining procedural animation, projection mapping, and situated design with wandering as a foundational method. Field research, off-grid exploration, and deep attention to place feed into projects that are as much about how you arrive at a subject as what you find there.
Preferring to position himself as a collaborator, Brendan moves fluidly between disciplines and contexts — building worlds with musicians, dancers, chefs, and ecologists as readily as working alone in a desert. The goal is to ignite curiosity around a subject while leaving a trail for those who want to follow.
In another life he works as a journalistic researcher, investigating the arms trade and extractive industries — particularly mining and its relationship to systemic injustice in the Global South. It is work that shares more with his artistic practice than it might appear. Both are fundamentally concerned with tracing the hidden logics of systems, and with the landscapes — human and otherwise — that bear the cost of them.