Pioneering net artist Rafaël Rozendaal on the freedom the internet affords him above any other medium

It’s Nice That: Can you remember the first time you worked with the internet and what interested you so much about it?

Rafaël Rozendaal: I remember the first time I browsed the web and I distinctly remember an immediate realisation, that the first thing you do when you go on the internet is look up things from the real world. So, I would look up information about comic books or lyrics to music, kind of using it as a library. But as you’re doing that, you start thinking, what can happen here that can’t happen in other media? Then when I was in art school, I came across this progressive Dutch TV channel that had a website where they would let artists do different experiments and that really blew my mind! The whole idea was to make things that can’t happen on TV – don’t treat it like TV but use the medium in a different way. And in school, I found out that the tools were not that hard to learn and that was really empowering: the idea that a newspaper or a TV channel or an artist, everybody has the same opportunity, especially in the beginning.

I also remember liking that the internet was so low bandwidth and you had to create a new visual language. You couldn’t use photography or the other tools that were known from cinema and television. Just like early video games have a very distinct aesthetic, the early internet did as well because of the limitations. I remember really liking those limitations.

INT: And were you one of those people who became completely fixated with code, or was it always more of an artistic pursuit for you?

RR: I always liked the idea of building images out of lines, because I come from drawing. And for that reason, I really liked vector graphics. I liked the scalability and the mathematics involved. It feels like you’re recreating your thoughts in math. But that’s not so much code, it’s still a visual tool. And then Flash came along, and that was such an extension of Adobe Illustrator. At that time, I knew a little bit of code. The boyfriend of someone in my class was studying computer science and there was something I couldn’t figure out and he helped me. And it just went from there.

INT: For a lot of people, the idea of a website being an artwork is still fairly challenging and that places your work in a really interesting place.

RR: Maybe it’s just a bad idea! I should just quit... I’ve thought about that, though, because when I started I thought it was just a new format, like video art. I thought everyone was going to be doing it soon enough but I actually think there are fewer people doing it now than before.

INT: You stuck with it, though! When did the idea to make the Art Website Sales Contract come about? Was it born out of necessity?

RR: I was speaking to friends who were video artists and they had this certain type of contract, because they didn’t want their work to be used in a commercial context and they wanted to specify how it would be exhibited. When you sell a painting, it’s pretty straightforward but with other media, there are a lot of questions.

INT: Looking at that in the context of technology like blockchain, for example, can you see your work moving forward in that world? Does that simplify or complicate the notion of giving a buyer the “original”?

RR: I don’t like blockchain one bit! It’s very funny, when something new comes along, people are very shocked when I don’t like it. For example, I’m really not into VR. When I put the headset on, I want to take it off as quickly as I can. It’s the opposite of a phone, which you just want to touch all the time, even if you’re not really looking for anything. Blockchain, the idea of creating unique binary sequences that can then be located, I saw it really messing with people’s heads when Bitcoin started to become big. People were so greedy and a lot of artists were putting a lot of money into it. And then Blockchain as a way of authenticating individual files is not very user-friendly and it’s not human-readable. A domain does a lot of things that Blockchain does not: there are words involved, it’s fun, it’s shareable – you can say it over the phone, someone can remember it, it has a location and is universally accessible with easy software, instead of needing a specific Bitcoin wallet or blah blah. I don’t really see the plus side of the Blockchain. I think it might find some use, but all the things we thought of distributed computing and quickly sending money across borders hasn’t really worked out that well. It’s a very slow platform and it turned out to be very energy inefficient.

INT: I think it gives your work an element of playfulness. Is that intentional?

RR: It’s so intuitive – making art is not as fun as you might think because it’s a lot of doubts. One of the interesting things that happens, though, is that a personality encounters a material. Two personalities will encounter a material very differently. I have my personality and when I touch the computer, that’s what comes out.

INT: When it comes to the naming of your works, specifically your web-based pieces, I’m interested in how you go about that. They often seem to have some underlying messaging, a punchline or some hint as to what the work is about. Is that true?

RR: Sometimes it’s very straightforward; there’s a website with toilet paper and toiletpaper.com was taken so it becomes papertoilet.com. But sometimes there’s a programming term in there, or a song that I was listening to.

INT: They really help to set the tone for the work, though.

RR: Yes, that’s intentional. I always want to make short names so that people can remember them and the main reason to make the works in domain names, for me, was so that the work feels finished. Back in the early days of people doing web experiments, as I said before, everyone had a homepage and then the experiments would be /experiments/4b.6/5b.7 or whatever and then a few years later they’re gone because it was just a folder. You also didn’t know if it was a study or a finished piece of work. So the domain names really help to define that this work will be here and it will always be here, you just need to bookmark it. You know how bookmarks are associated with this idea of link rot, where people change the structure of their URL scheme on their site and all of a sudden their links don’t work? Instead, if you have something that is always in this domain name, it gives it permanence.

INT: Yeah, you’ve mentioned before how giving a piece of net art a domain name is the same as framing a sketch. It elevates it.

RR: Exactly.

INT: On the flip side, do you see any negative impacts on creativity from the fact that anyone – or any artist – can upload anything to the web?

RR: No, I think it’s social media that is the devil. It makes people feel awful.

INT: What do you think about the fact that people produce work specifically for Instagram now?

RR: It’s odd because it’s so small... But I think making a web page is still a little bit tricky, not everyone can do it. And most people are too lazy to do it. But when it’s as easy as Snapchat or whatever, something goes wrong. You would think that removing friction makes everything better, but maybe there’s a point where a bit of friction is good, you still need an FTP server and you still need to know how to code a bit [to make a website] and that barrier is kind of interesting.

There’s also this thing that I call the “make you feel bad industry” and it’s like every time something comes out and you think you like it, something happens to ruin that: “I like Instagram – well, turns out it’s making teenagers depressed”; or “I like Uber – turns out it’s creating suicide among taxi drivers.”

INT: With Abstract Browsing, was turning those screenshots into weaves in any way a response to this kind of negativity that you feel towards certain parts of the internet?

RR: It came from the idea that, in the real world, you can do things to change your perception of something, wear glasses with a different colour or look through a lens that turns something upside down, take drugs, things like that and everything looks different. And then when code comes in, you can filter it in some way and change the perception of the code so the first browser extension I made was Text Free Browsing, which mimicked something from the early internet days called image-free browsing, which allowed for low bandwidth. As you wouldn’t have to load images, you could search the web a little faster. And I thought the opposite was interesting, where you would only see images as all the text is removed. It was just a way of thinking about how you could change how you see the internet.

You could see that as a reaction to the world being overwhelming and wanting to reduce it down to just colours. But my interest is more to do with making abstract compositions because I like investigating how we move through a rectangle with our eyes. It’s interesting how websites are designed year on year, in an evolutionary process to make you more sticky, you keep you there longer, to scroll forever. And I’m interested in how your eyes move across the screen, and that’s a lot easier to analyse when you remove all of the information. When you remove the images, the text, all of a sudden you can focus on the flow of the page. The interesting part of it is not saying these corporations are good or bad or whatever, but it’s interesting that they have such a different approach to composition than all of art history because most of art history is about the artist deciding where things go. But here, it’s an algorithm learning from the users that if it, for example, moves the feed a little to the left, it turns out people stay ten seconds longer, and they’ll test that all around the world. So it’s this weird AI together with humans creating compositions that nobody thinks about.