I made a new website: Please Comment .us

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I made a new website: looking at something .com

Gif Melter by Chris Shier is a weird tool that turns an animated gif into a psychedelic interactive webpage.

Below are some of my “melted” gifs. Click on the images to get the full interactive experience.

(via Today&Tomorrow)

I’m part of a group show called Book Machine, curated by One Star Press.
The exhibition deals with the book as an artistic medium, and fonts made by artists.

My video Domain Name Book and my font will be on display.

Participating artists:
Carlos Amorales / Tauba Auerbach / Elvire Bonduelle / Martin Boyce / Nathan Carter /Paul Chan / Claude Closky / Ryan Gander / Nicolas Guagnini / Sean Micka / Giles Round / Rafaël Rozendaal / David Shrigley by Andy Leek / Mika Tajima / Rirkrit Tiravanija / Lawrence Weiner / Jonathan Monk

Opening:
Wednesday February 20
Centre Pompidou
19 Rue Beaubourg
Paris, France

I’m participating in Decenter,
an Exhibition on the Centenary of the 1913 Armory Show,
curated by Andrianna Campbell and Daniel S. Palmer.

Think of the show as cubism through the eyes of contemporary artists:
Cory Arcangel, Tony Cokes, Douglas Coupland, David Kennedy Cutler, N. Dash, Michael Delucia, Jessica Eaton, Franklin Evans, Amy Feldman, Andrea Geyer, David Gilbert, Ethan Greenbaum, Gregor Hildebrandt, Butt Johnson, John Houck, Barbara Kasten, Andrew Kuo, Liz Magic Laser, Douglas Melini, Ulrike Mohr, Brenna Murphy, John Newman, Gabriel Orozco, Rafaël Rozendaal, Seher Shah, Travess Smalley, Sara VanDerBeek

Opening:
6-8 PM Sunday, February 17, 2013
Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, New York, NY
DecenterArmory.com

Composition: the arrangement of elements in time and space.

The browser is very different from other media, especially when it comes to composition. I believe we are at the very beginning of the aesthetic potential of the networked image.

This is an (incomplete) list of compositional characteristics of the browser.

The internet presents artists with challenges, opportunities, and best of all, a lack of history.

The size of a browser can change at any moment. There is no fixed dimension or ratio. Think of an image, that can shrink or expand at any time. Ideally the artwork anticipates every possible dimension. Colors are rendered differently depending on hardware, software and usage. Websites are ubique yet inconsistent in appearance.

There are many kinds of devices. Some have big pixels, some have small pixels. A 1 pixel line on a smartphone is different from a 1 pixel line on an old CRT monitor. The physical experience of each device is unique.

The user is present in the pictorial space. There might be a cursor or finger that can influence the composition. Interaction is not unique to the browser but it is something that is natural to internet users.

Many people at the same time can influence an image. There is a potential for social images that change over time by allowing users to modify an image, like a wikipedia article.

Computers are good at generating random numbers. I’m not sure if those numbers are truly random, but it’s good enough. Each time the artwork is viewed, it can be slightly or dramatically different.

The networked image can keep pulling information from the web. The elements of composition can change all the time, because the web’s content changes all the time.

In the early days of the internet, bandwidth was very limited. This digital frugality created a new visual language.

Browsers do not have the same rendering power as native applications. This is a limitation and an opportunity at the same time. Challenges like these force artists to come up with new solutions.

I recently received an email, asking if my website much better than this .com could be projected at a wedding. I’m happy to see my work being enjoyed all over the world, especially in Japan, AKA the coolest place in the world!

I hope Noria & Haruna had a nice wedding, and lots of love in the rest of your life!

You can find me on Instagram: @newrafael

Google image search just got a whole lot better. The new interface is very effective. Just search for images, and select an image. It shows a large preview in the same window. And you can browse through the results with your cursor key.

(this new layout is rolling out now, you might have to wait a few days before it appears in your region)

We still have a long way to go in interface design. I think one big challenges is how to make large amounts of content digestible. Coffee table books are still much better if you want to sit down and look at a large amount of images. But I think it won’t take long before the web becomes better at artists monographs than printed books.

I’ve had many discussions with different people about cultural disciplines or categories.

How Art has a longterm value over Pop Culture, how Books are often better than Movies, how Architecture is following Technology, how Fashion always takes from Music, on and on and on.

All these categories are restricting and mostly useless.

It does not matter if something is Literature or Advertising or Entertainment or Academia,

what matters is if something is interesting.

Finally!

I have been searching the internets for years and I found it, a Towelie towel! (Affiliate link)

From Wikipedia:
Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained on the DVD commentary for “Towelie” that the character was conceived as a joking reference to the over-marketing of characters in the wake of the series’ success. Eric Cartman delivers the penultimate line of Towelie’s eponymous episode: “You’re the worst character ever, Towelie,” to which Towelie responds, “I know”.

Every frame from Please Touch Me .com (2005)

I decided to unfriend everyone on my private Facebook account. Facebook is a big distraction and this is the best way for me to deal with it. It’s too tempting, I’m always curious what’s going on.

I couldn’t delete my account because my public page has a lot of followers and I want to continue publishing there.

OK, back to work!

I work a lot with geometrical images. They are shapes based on mathematical instructions.

You can write down the equation of the circle, and imagine the circle in your mind. In your mind, the circle is absolutely perfect. It is absolutely round.

Unfortunately there is no screen, printer, or natural phenomenon that can render a perfect circle. There will always be some particles bouncing out of place. And even if we did somehow manage to create perfection for a brief moment, our imperfect eyes would not be able to perceive it. Our eyes show us a distorted image that our mind corrects.

Geometrical images are conceptual images, they only really exist in our mind.

I’m excited to let you know I will be showing a selection of works on the video wall of Salon 94.
6 of my websites will be playing day and night for a month.

The gallery is right next to the New Museum on the Bowery in New York.

This Friday my presentation will be launched together with the opening of Takuro Kuwata’s exhibition.

Arranged by Mark Brown.

Salon 94
243 Bowery
New York, NY, 10002
Opening: Friday, January 18, 6 – 8 pm.

Back in 2004 I moved to Los Angeles. I shared a studio with Jonathan Maghen and we started a T-shirt line called Tagbanger.

As artists, we were most excited about creating images. It was a nice form of collaboration, we both created and found images and then we would sit together and review the ideas. Sometimes we would execute the ideas together, sometimes separately. We found a great printer who used waterbased inks, we found a great T-shirt manufacturer, and we had nice labels made.

What we underestimated is that a business requires a lot more than just creating a product.

I tried going to stores to offer them our shirts but I would just feel awkward. And the logistics were not easy either.

We sold quite a few shirts but it never became a big thing that we could do fulltime. I really admire artists who are able to create a business of consumer oriented art products. In simple words: affordable art that anyone can buy.

Below are all the T-shirts we made. It was great fun and we made some money, and I learned a lot.

Brand New: Text Free Browsing, a chrome extension by Rafaël Rozendaal & Jonas Lund.

Text Free Browsing does what the name says: once you install it, you can click on a little nerdy face to turn off all text on the internet. You can turn TextFree on and off on at any moment. Try it!

You can download it for free in the Chrome Web Store