Inner launches Tuesday, October 3 on newrafael.work

81 Landscapes is a new collection of 81 fully on-chain artworks.
Smart Contract by Alberto Granzotto.

This is not a generative project. All colors were manually chosen… human intuition.

This project will be “released” next year. I decided to mint them early, the works were ready, and I like the feeling of having a record when the work was first complete. But none of these are for sale till some time next year.

Homage 43 & 49 at Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop

Photos by Philipp Ottendörfer, 2023

Thank you to
Family Collection Klinkhamer,
Collection Tim Whidden,
Infinite Objects.

81 Horizons Book (2023)

Design by Thomas Spallek
Photos by Christopher Lützen
Published by Museum Folkwang / Walter König Verlag

if you want to be an artist

do what you want

not what they want

less strategy 👉 more fun

less fear 👉 more joy

less meaning 👉 more energy

less limits 👉 more freedom

less stress 👉 more naps

less opinion 👉 more ideas

less worry 👉 more hope

less doubts 👉 more decisions

a fire?
a door?
a mystery?
an example?
a lightning rod?
a lifestyle?
a religion?
a waterfall?
a storm?

Color, Code, Communication
Curated by Thomas Seelig

Opening: April 20 at 19:00
Live performance by Legowelt 23:00 at Goethe Bunker

The exhibition consists of various manifestations of immaterial art (projections, screens, murals, instructions, books, happenings, music). My work will also be exhibited at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop.

April 21-22: NFT symposium at Museum Folkwang

RAFAËL ROZENDAAL
Color, Code, Communication
Rafaël Rozendaal is one of the world’s best-known digital artists. Already in the early 2000s, he created, presented, and sold works in the form of websites. In his current NFT projects, he also creates references to art history, using generative technologies on the blockchain. Rozendaal’s works exist in multiple forms and locations: as immersive installations, in browser windows, as artist books, and in public spaces. Color, Code, Communication is the first major monographic NFT exhibition in a European museum and is accompanied by a symposium.

45 minutes of browsing & talking, turn sound up!

Rafaël Rozendaal – Screen Time
26 November – 24 December, 2022
Takuro Someya Contemporary Art

Photos by Shu Nakagawa

Screen Time comprises two ongoing series of works: Into Time, a series of lenticular paintings, and Abstract Browsing, a series of jacquard tapestries.

As hinted by the title of this exhibition, both Into Time and Abstract Browsing are explorations into the nature of time in its various forms.

Rozendaal has remarked in interviews and writings that the “landscapes” we most often encounter in our contemporary society are seen through the “window” of a screen on our electronic devices rather than an actual window in space. In the context of the history of humans and landscapes, we have shifted from the time when people looked out into the world through physical windows to the time when families gathered around the television set to watch moving images. And now, in this present moment, we have grown accustomed to spending our time on the individual screens of our personal devices, consuming our favorite content when and where we please. If one were to name these different periods on the basis of their visual cultures, perhaps “screen time” would be a fitting one for this most recent iteration. As the title of this exhibition, Screen Time evokes the expanse of time in which the continuum of visual culture is developing.

For artists attempting to face the questions posed by our contemporary aesthetics, Rozendaal has long been a pioneering figure. Abstract Browsing is a series of jacquard tapestries based on images of abstracted websites, which are created by “abstract browsing.net,” a browser plug-in developed by the artist in 2014. The tool, available for free on Google Chrome, abstracts all information present on a webpage into geometric units of bright colors. Rozendaal runs this program daily on well-known websites ranging from newspapers to real estate listings, generating thousands of images. From those, he selects compositions that appear striking or unusual in some way to create as paintings through the medium of jacquard weaving. The jacquard loom is an early prototype of the computer; as such, the textile it produces can be understood as both a digital image and a mechanically produced material. With this choice of medium, Rozendaal draws out the connection between digital images and traditional manufacturing techniques to highlight that, far from being a new media, the “digital” has a long history.

The new tapestries presented in this exhibition are all the same width but vary in height, with some of the tallest approaching three meters. Their exaggerated dimensions recall the vertical format of scrolling through the web on our phones. In this way, these works emphasize the shared verticality of web browsers and the weaving process, in which the fabric takes shape one row at a time. In recent years, however, it has also become possible to take screenshots of entire web pages. Unlike the experience of scrolling and taking in text and information slowly, the screenshot transforms the website into an image that can be seen in its entirety in a much shorter span of time. This is also in stark contrast to the slow unfolding of time that is inherent to the process of creating a tapestry. In these ways, the various textures of time that exist within the screen as a tapestry and among the many other screens that make up our daily lives are interwoven into the tapestries presented here.

Into Time is a series of lenticular paintings that departs from the traditional concept of painting in that they cannot be experienced instantaneously but must be seen over a duration of time. Some of the works in this series are based on the geometric patterns and color gradations generated through Rozendaal’s website works, intotime.us, intotime.com, and intotime.org.

Rozendaal’s lenticular paintings contain time within them, and as such, it is only by moving our bodies around these works that we can experience them in their entirety. The surface of a lenticular painting functions similarly to that of a screen such as an RGB monitor or an image cast by a projector. But whereas monitors and projectors are media that display images standing in for physical “landscapes” as they change to and fro, the nature of the lenticular medium is such that it becomes the shifting image itself. And just as an actual landscape contains an infinity of views that depend on the position of the viewer, so too does the lenticular. The new lenticular paintings presented in Screen Time reflect the ongoing development of Rozendaal’s sense of colors and their combinations.

Both the jacquard tapestry and the lenticular print are materials with long histories. By selecting them as his media, Rozendaal draws our attention to the largely unknown connection between such traditional techniques and the digital devices and technologies with which he makes images, enabling us to understand these seemingly disjointed elements as points along the continuum of our visual culture. This exhibition, and Rozendaal’s artistic practice as a whole, hints at the diversity of time in its many forms. The expanded scale of Rozendaal’s newest work draws us into a new moment following the many disruptions brought about by the pandemic as well as the rise of NFTs, allowing us again to enjoy the experience of standing before a physical work and letting the time pass us by.

trying

not to think

about money

this one?

that one?

no the other one

no more problems

not one

ever again

i made something, you should see it!

it is great because

– it represents the core of my being
– i worked on it for a long time
– i did a lot of research
– it will go up in value
– it will make the world a better place
– famous people love it
– i am aware of art history

Cabinets NFT series
generative – onchain – indie

empty pockets
empty phrases
empty gestures
empty calories
empty stomach
empty vessel
empty promise
empty threat
empty house
empty hard drive
empty fridge
empty wallet
empty table
empty bed
empty horizon
empty nester
empty page
empty time
empty mind

Polychrome Music

A generative project by Rafaël Rozendaal and Danny Wolfers (Legowelt)

Wednesday, August 24, 1PM EST on Artblocks

Legowelt: For Polychrome Music I designed a generative music system that plays an infinite composition on 3 different audio channels, each with their own synthesizer. These randomly generate simple musical timbres inspired by early computer sound chips. The music itself is generated by randomly selecting 3 patterns out of a pool of 180. These patterns, which are little 8-bar music pieces, were written in the same C# Dorian scale so they always fit together. This is a pleasant sounding minor and colorful scale that I believe fits the general vibe of Rafaël’s work. Composition wise, channel 1 plays the bassline and channels 2 and 3 the melody, countermelody, arpeggios and harmonies. The system changes the patterns each time they are played, reversing, speeding up or slowing down the pattern or changing the synthesizer channel they are played on. In essence the system infinitely randomly remixes the source melodies to create ever new surprising pieces that harmonize with the colorful compositions.

Brand new custom NFT project.