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Rafaël Rozendaal on a Liquid Canvas

Visual and web-based artist Rafaël Rozendaal's work, Light: Rafaël Rozendaal, is on display at the Museum of Modern Art's Agnes Gund Garden Lobby through Spring 2025. Rozendaal spoke with Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) about the significance of the exhibition and how it reflects his emphasis on lightness and accessibility in art.

Peter Bauman: Your work uses the visual vocabulary of the Internet and our digital lives but subverts them—actually asking us to disconnect and slow down. I'm curious how you think about art and technology generally and whether art should be an accessory to technological innovation or a critique of it. Your work seems to suggest both.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: I don't have any goals with my work so I have no intention whatsoever. People can look at it for a second, lifetime or anything in between.
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Art, to me, is following your interests without any expectations. 

I don't know what the viewer does. That's not up to me. When I started making websites, the idea of a website was to offer information, links and contact info like, “Welcome to my homepage.” “Here are my 10 favorite other sites.” “Here's my site.” A homepage was basically your digital home that offered you all kinds of information. Artists would then say, “Well, I make watercolors. Here's a couple of photos of my watercolors as JPEGs.” The photos would be very compressed and small. It would be a lesser version of a work that existed outside of the Internet. That was the idea of how an artist would approach the Internet. Nowadays, you could argue some works look better on the Internet than in person.
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My whole idea was: if we're looking at the website, then the experience is there. What can you do on that website that is an experience there that you cannot do in video, sculpture, installation or all the different other media or materials?

It was a simple idea. If you're taking the Internet seriously because it's so accessible, then I wanted to create something specific for the browser. The visual language came out of that.
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The browser is liquid. It's a liquid canvas. It's not a fixed size. That's a starting point. Instead of creating an artwork that is square, landscape or portrait, you have to make an artwork that anticipates any aspect ratio and size. 

Very quickly, you arrive at vector graphics because they're lightweight, scalable and future-proof. Video art is made in a fixed resolution. First it was 720p. Then HD came out, now 4K, and then 8K. I wanted to make works that are universally accessible and anticipate the displays of the future. The works are theoretically ready for any display.

As far as the feeling of arriving at a work, I found it very interesting at the time to put things in a domain name and to create these dead ends because the Internet was all about connecting things, about linking. I thought it was interesting to remove all that. An old example of a website of mine is fataltotheflesh.com and it's a mouse cursor only. If you drag it while clicking, the screen starts to bleed. It's an observation of the mouse cursor looking like a sharp object.
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Back then, it took me quite some time for each work. It would be an initial ground idea: cutting your screen. Then I would make drips with paint to see how liquid moves on a piece of paper. I would photograph that and convert it into vector graphics. Then I worked with my coder to make it interactive. Let's say that's a three-month project.
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What you're seeing as a viewer is the end of me following my curiosity.

What I like about domain names is that they’re dead ends. You just arrive there and that's it. There's no description, there's no price, there's no biographical information or anything like that. It’s a reaction to a media-saturated landscape and doomscrolling.

When I read your questions, what I thought about is that from your formative years, people don't change that much. In my formative years, my computer was not connected to the Internet. My first computer for myself I got in art school—maybe the second year. I bought an old Mac from a teacher. It was maybe ten years old, running Photoshop and Illustrator version two or three. It was very slow. I was comfortable with other (older) media—silk screening, painting or drawing. This new tool was interesting. “What can I do in Photoshop that I can't do otherwise?” But I didn't really enjoy it. Then once I opened Illustrator, I enjoyed the small files and the leanness so I went in that direction.

A couple years later, I got a newer computer and was able to animate things. I started out animating videos but would have to compress those very heavily for the Internet—a very reduced experience. Once Macromedia Flash happened, it clicked: “I can make something that anyone can see and it loads in a second.”

My point is I started in a very distraction-free environment. My computer would be in my room. I was living in a student house with a couple of roommates and we didn't have internet. We didn't have TV. I would have a zip disk and then do an experiment. If I wanted to upload it, I had to walk over to school. The Internet was outside of my room.
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Still for me, a computer that's not online is a more creative computer. 

It's very similar to writers who can’t write on an internet-connected computer. You just need this room of focus.
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‍Peter Bauman: Maybe I need to try that. You talked about how your work and your domain names are dead ends. There's no price, there's no title. The viewer is confronted with the work only. This directness stands in contrast to other ways of interacting with art online.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: If you enter a commercial art gallery, the price and the title are not next to the work. In a museum, there’s a label, but it doesn't say the price, and it's not for sale. In those spaces, you're also just confronted with the work and I think that's very normal.

Now we've gotten used to seeing a work on OpenSea, where the work is very small and all the metadata is very present. All the NFT platforms, everything is geared towards, “You're seeing one thing but what about this? What about this? What about..” It's always that YouTube thing with the next ten thumbnails.
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That is what the Internet is but that's not who I am. 

I love making work that's available to everyone. For example, all my generative projects—some on Art Blocks and some on my own platform—exist with all the metadata and thumbnails. Then on my own homepage, I present them as just the generator without any interface so you can disappear into the work.

That's an ongoing question. It's a similar question to how a lot of people don't like algorithmic feeds because the platform controls what you see. The answer is very simple: go back to RSS but nobody does. I'm using it in a Web1 way and then you give up on traffic or attention.

‍Peter Bauman: This goes back to your roots in net art and Web1.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: Yeah, the moment when I started, that's just how it was. It's like those old guys who still have a ponytail because it was very cool when they were young [laughs]. What's funny about showing work without an interface is that it's very normal for any other artist. It's only for NFT or web artists that you're supposed to think about the interface.
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You don't make a sculpture and then think, “Where do I put the Buy Button?”

“No buttons—here's the work” makes total sense to me. But I also understand that most people now live in their feed so you optimize work for that.

‍Peter Bauman: It's aligned with your mantra of “lightness”—keeping things simple and weeding out complexity in both your life and practice. That resonates with me. I've also lived abroad my adult life and not really ever felt a sense of geographic permanence. I'm wondering if you see “lightness” as a lifelong guiding principle. Or could you envision a time where putting down roots might reshape your practice?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: Since COVID, I travel much less and I have a nicer living situation. I used to always live in the tiniest place and then you had an urge to travel. Now, I'm not so keen on traveling as much.

You can feel the joy of sharing work and it being accessible to everyone but I also love making work in other media. I'm painting now and the paintings are difficult to document. They're much better in person. There's people who look way better online than they do in person; it's the same with art. I also feel that way about my animations—they don't look as good on Instagram or Twitter. The videos are very compressed and you lose all the purity. There's a lot of artists who make work specifically for social media. Someone like Beeple is a master of creating this feeling of scale and space within an image in social media.
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‍Peter Bauman: What are your preferences for scale? You leave your work open for the user to customize but how do you prefer it—on a giant display, like currently at the [Museum of Modern Art] MoMA?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: I'm a desktop person. I love the desktop. It's more of a creative device than the phone. In theory, any size is fine but the phone is pretty brutal. It's really small. If people only see a square recording of a generative animation on Instagram, it loses a lot of its charm. I would say a laptop is the minimum.

‍Peter Bauman: We’ll talk more about how now people can see your work on a 25-foot display in New York, in the lobby at MoMA. But I'm interested in your thoughts on preservation. You said just now that you wanted to make work that's future proof and theoretically ready for any display. Then you also mentioned working in Flash, which is now obsolete.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: The first ten years of my work were in Flash. Then we switched to JavaScript. That year, every month, my coder Reinier Feijen and I converted a few pieces. It took two or three years before all the pieces were converted.

It wasn't just Flash. It was also the introduction of the touchscreen. Some of the interactive pieces didn't make sense. There are pieces that would use the hover state of the mouse and we had to rethink what that meant for a touchscreen. Some pieces I thought didn't work anymore so I took them down. Most are still there.

Overall, that's a lot easier than preserving physical art. I think there's this fear of digital art being difficult to preserve. Especially now with AI, converting things from one coding language to another is going to get easier and easier. I do think it's something the artist has to be close to as long as they're alive but I'm very optimistic.

The best way I can describe it is one of my first collectors bought a couple of my websites. Some of those were in Flash. We recoded them for JavaScript. They're fine. They've been running a long time. I was visiting him in a big house in Austria and he had all these different types of art. He had a termite problem with these medieval wooden church sculptures. That's a lot more precarious than converting something from Flash to JavaScript.

If you speak to restorers, they have to work on the original. If they make a mistake, they damage the original. In the digital, you copy the folder and mess around with it. You still have the old folder and you can compare it. It's pretty easy. It's different for people who make work for a specific moment in software history, like making a response to the YouTube button of 1999 but that button doesn't exist anymore.
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Rafaël Rozendaal, Circulate, 2024. Courtesy of the artist

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‍Peter Bauman: Certain artists—I'm thinking of Samia Halaby or even net artists like Auriea Harvey—still want their work viewed with particular hardware and software. But it seems you're the opposite.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: I like this idea that physical work deteriorates over time and digital work improves. Displays improve. I remember showing something on a 45-inch TV, which back in the day was super cool. Now you wouldn't even do that anymore. The colors have gotten better; the frame rate is better.
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When Mondrian finished his paintings, they probably looked very slick but now they look all crackled—the white is yellow or gray and the colors are faded. With my work, it's the opposite. It gets more intense over time. Pigments lose intensity.

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‍Peter Bauman: Does that imply that the work itself is code because the visual output changes over time? Is that how you see the art? More like Sol LeWitt’s instructions or the game Pong, which you referenced to Paola Antonelli and is playable on anything from an Atari to an Apple Watch?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: I don't think the code is legible for most people; I can't read code. So that already says a lot. I work with a coder. For me, the work is the thing that I see in the browser. I can edit the code; I can change certain values but very quickly I'll make a mistake and there'll be a bug and it crashes. I need the coder to make the work.
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What you see is the work. 

For example, at MoMA, the screen was so large that we slowed down the works quite a bit. We were live editing the code on that screen on a desk with a keyboard and a mouse. We were there with the curators and could change the work right there. That's very different from a wall painting. You can't spend two months doing it and then think, “Oh, it should have been orange. Yellow was not the right color.” But with code, you can really just hit a button and decide, “That yellow is a little too bright on this screen.”

When you make things for the web, you don't control everyone's viewing experience. Someone might have their saturation or brightness in a weird setting. I can't control that. When it's an exhibition and I'm there, we can control that. Most exhibitions that I do, I set up a desk in the middle of the space and we just browse and see what feels right for the space. That's when the lightness is really a plus. I can just open a text editor and change the color of the work. Sometimes an animation has a white background and that turns out to be too bright in the room. You change it to black—easy.
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What I like about code is you can optimize it for the environment. 

It's really fun opening up a browser and you control all the pixels. You say, “I want this to happen. I want that to happen.” I don't know any other medium where you can change an environment that quickly.

‍Peter Bauman: You see the visuals as the final artwork but that artwork is also dynamic without necessarily a fixed aesthetic.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: Yeah. We’re talking about the difference between the algorithm and the script. The algorithm is what Sol LeWitt means by: “This line is bouncing against the edges of the wall, and every time it bounces, it changes 15 degrees in direction.” That’s also what you might call "pseudocode," something you could describe. The code itself is specific to the language that you're using. That was ActionScript before and now it's JavaScript. In the future, it might be something else.
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Code is an execution or a temporary optimal version of an idea. The idea is the algorithm or the pseudocode. 

You can't really separate them. I start with the idea and I make a storyboard. Then I start talking to my programmer in pseudocode. “I want this to happen, and if that happens, I want this to happen.” That's natural language plus a couple of JPEGs or an Illustrator file. Then he starts coding and I respond to that. The pseudocode is written in stone and the JavaScript has to follow that.

Then I respond to the JavaScript. I play with all the digits and start messing around with it. Maybe a bug shows up that’s interesting and we may expand on it. The way I work with code, it's two-dimensional diagrammatic, line-based objects. We call that vector graphics. That could be in the SVG language or that could be in JavaScript. It's not specific to a certain coding language.
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‍Peter Bauman: You mentioned two dimensional vector graphics and what always strikes me about that work is its flatness, an inherent quality of screens. With your work, Light: Rafaël Rozendaal, on display at the MoMA lobby, what do you hope to achieve by engaging audiences with this format?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: It's the best screen I've worked on so far in the sense of the screen’s relationship to the space, the audience and to the rest of the museum. What I really like about it is that it becomes an art object in the same way a wall painting would be. You can spend a minute, hour or whatever you want. It becomes part of the rest of the museum. You enter and might look at it for five minutes. Then go upstairs and come back; you see it again. The sun hits the screen and it becomes a very physical thing.

What I like about museums is their long-term time horizon. It's very different if this was a museum that was only showing digital art but this is a museum that also has works from two hundred years ago. Everything else in culture is about five-minute hype cycles. A lot of Web3 people think, “Why are these institutions so slow? We buy stuff in a second. Why do they have to think about it for a year?” But I think it's important to have these places with time horizons in the hundreds to thousands of years. If you think about The Met, they start with Egyptian art—a very long-term time horizon. That's the special thing about showing work in a longer timeline than your Twitter feed.

It also felt like the conclusion of a thesis of starting out on the Internet saying,
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“Hey, I'm not going to treat the web as a portfolio but as a medium.” 

Back then, I remember going to openings, talking to people at galleries, and they’d say, “What work do you make?” I'd reply, “I make art on the Internet.” “Oh, cool. Can you make me a website?”
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They didn’t get it. It's the web as a medium. That took maybe 25 years to say, “Look, we're running the browser now at MoMA at 25-foot scale.”

I think now it's not a question anymore. To some people, it's still a bit tacky making art for the Internet but I think we've gotten to a point where most people can accept experiencing art online. The whole reason the Internet was fun is that you can put up ideas you're not sure of. When you think about Reddit, not every post you post is sure to be a masterpiece but that's part of the fun of the Internet. Then if you go to Web3 and you only do one drop a year and it has to be amazing, you take out a lot of the spontaneity.

‍Peter Bauman: That highlights what's so important about this show for digital art, because MoMA is not a museum that has necessarily emphasized digital art relative to its peers.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: They did The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age in 1968, which had work by Lillian Schwartz even. So they've tried. I remember there was a design exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli, Design and the Elastic Mind. They had this IBM Supercomputer from the '80s that was just there as an object with all these red-blinking lights; it looked like a sci-fi computer. They have addressed the topic. But when you think of MoMA, you think of Picasso and Mondrian.
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If I have any hope for the show, it is this feeling of possibility that younger artists think, “This is achievable for me.” 

Most art now—with space and materials—is so expensive and out of reach for regular people that you just feel hopeless. How can I ever be an artist? The computer gives you this feeling—even if I only have an hour a day, I can still experiment and share things.

‍Peter Bauman: Having your work shown at MoMA is certainly a step in the right direction, where it’s on a screen that you compared to a wall painting. How is it also different? I'm wondering what you think about skeuomorphism.‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: Interestingly, with Mondrian’s path from figuration to abstraction, he resolved to completely remove the illusion of three-dimensional space in painting. I never understood why his paintings were not silk-screened, not mechanically produced because it's a diagram. Why isn't it perfect? But now I do understand because he's operating in the language of painting.

For example, if you make a painting with two lines crossing, you could think one line feels closer to you and the other one feels further. How do you prevent that from happening?
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What I'm saying is you're looking at a screen. I'm not trying to bring you to another world. The world that you're looking at is the screen itself. 

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‍Peter Bauman: You're friends with Jennifer and Kevin McCoy and Harm van den Dorpel—some of the original artists to intervene with blockchains and essentially invent NFTs. One of their breakthroughs was digital ownership. But you had this idea of the Internet as “a Xerox machine times a million” with essentially infinitely reproducible images. Was there any friction there? Did you see the blockchain as the solution to the problem of digital scarcity or opposed to your ethos of reproducibility?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: I was aware of blockchain and NFTs but I thought they were very hard to use. I want my work to be easy to find. I waited quite a while. The way I thought of digital scarcity before NFTs was domain names. What I like about domain names is they're human-readable and they're easy to remember. If someone buys a website and they want to share the work, they could just talk to someone and mention the name of a work: go to iamveryverysorry.com. You could just remember that. That's way cooler than a contract address. The only issue with domain names is that you rent them; you don't really own them. If you forget to extend it, you lose it. That's a fatal flaw.

I love the ownership part of the blockchain but I think it's still too hard to use for most people. I think we all know that. I can't square how you keep it decentralized and open but also easy to use for most people.
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What's interesting about ownership is it creates an incentive for people to look more intently, to look at the differences between projects and mints. 

Bringing ownership for digital art has made looking at the digital art different. Before people thought, “That's just an image on my feed,” and then you forget about it. Now it's different. I own this; I talk about it and it's long-term. That's positive. Maybe my disappointment is that it's not as decentralized as it could be. Nothing is perfect but it definitely changed my life. It opened up a lot of possibilities and I became much more productive. I was already doing okay but this just enhanced it.

One of the things that's cool about blockchain is the on-chain element. I had always made work very small in file size, which at some point didn't even matter because the download speeds are so high. All of a sudden it mattered again. So I enjoyed that a lot.
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‍Peter Bauman: Speaking, perhaps, of that wish for greater decentralization, how do you think about Web3’s domain names, ENS?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: What's ironic is that the ENS domain names are still rented. They're not owned. Everything in blockchain is ownership except that. It's stupid.

‍Peter Bauman: They've squeezed that bit of Web2 into Web3. Even back to Web1 and net art, the web is interactive. You craft these meditative corners of the web—these “dead ends”—yet you still resist complete passivity and invite interaction at times. How did you navigate between positioning the audience as more passive and encouraging engagement?‍

‍Rafaël Rozendaal: My first ten years was a lot of interactive work.
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What can you do in a browser that you can't do in other environments? 

There is a long history of concrete animation like Oskar Fischinger and others but they didn't have the option or dimension of interactivity. With my early interactive work—one is onandoff.org—it's just a light switch. You can flip it and nothing else happens. It's an interactive depiction of a light switch.
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There have been many depictions of many objects in art history. What happens when you add that interactive dimension to a depiction?

Interaction with a computer is always goal-oriented: “Double click to open a folder, scroll to read more, click here to buy.” I was interested in interaction as a dimension of depiction. As a baby, a key way you perceive the world is through touch. I thought that element was unexplored territory in art—making interaction without the expectation of a game or software. The interactive aspect faded out of my work over time. I don't know why but the new works became less interactive.

That's why I'm also shifting to painting now. First I would make a drawing and think, “What could the user do?” Then I would make drawings and think, “What could the script do?” Now I'm making a drawing and thinking, “This doesn't even have to move anymore.” That's why I arrived at things like 81 Horizons. But I'm still making animated images. Again, I just follow my interests.



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Rafaël Rozendaal is a visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. His work has been exhibited at MoMA, Times square, Centre Pompidou, LACMA, Whitney Museum, Valencia Biennial, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, Seoul Art Square, Stedelijk Museum and more.
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‍Peter Bauman (Monk Antony) is Le Random's Editor-in-Chief.