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Rafaël Rozendaal: 25 Years Online, and a Studio Without a Computer

In a 2-part interview published October 22, Rafaël Rozendaal looks back on a quarter century of websites, Art Blocks and on-chain horizons, and explains why his newest work is paint on canvas.

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For 25 years, Rafaël Rozendaal has made art with computers. Now the computer sits in the storage room next to his painting studio in New York. "The computer has actually become so bad for me that I have to discourage myself from using it," he tells Anika Meier in a 2-part interview Right Click Save published on October 22. Rozendaal shared it that night as a rare chance "to talk about my work in depth, not tied to any specific release or exhibition."

It starts with the websites. His first show, in 2001 at Miltos Manetas' Electronic Orphanage in Los Angeles, put adolescent browser jokes in a serious gallery. Then came what he calls "interactive depictions": a roll of toilet paper that unspools as you scroll, onandoff.org (2003), a button that does nothing when you click it, and Please Touch Me (2005), a hand whose fingers you can rearrange. "I wanted to isolate the interaction itself," he says. Against media art that looked to him like "swarms of mosquitoes," he wanted a clear choice. "I wanted to make an elephant."

The blockchain gave older ideas a format. Endless Nameless (2021) on Art Blocks came from a single work that "produced so many different compositions that it didn't feel like a single work," which he had kept on his hard drive because he did not know how to publish it. 81 Horizons (2021) began as 12 enamel signs; Harm van den Dorpel, then running left.gallery, showed him the images could be encoded as SVGs and live entirely on-chain. In 2024 and 2025, 25 of his website works filled the big screen in the Agnes Gund Lobby at MoMA for Light, which he describes as finding "a cheat code in a video game."

The paintings are where he is now. They began in the bright colors of the websites, chosen so the work would survive on any screen, and grew paler with each version: Table, Cheese and Blank Road (all 2024), Grey Window and Pink Blue Window. "A lot of my work is about reducing an image and its subject to the point where abstraction comes to the foreground, while there is still a figurative reason for the composition," he says. He tried bringing the pale palette back into animation, and "it doesn't work on a screen." He is not closing the door, though: "I'm not saying I'll never make digital work again. This is just the period I'm in now."

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