The Unbearable Lightness of Being Online

On the occasion of the exhibition Light: Rafaël Rozendaal, which features a selection of the artist's websites on a 25-foot high-resolution screen at MoMA, we visited Rozendaal in his New York studio. A lively discussion ensued.

And part of that interest in travel too was that I never wanted to hold on to things or have too many possessions. That’s why the Internet was so freeing, because my practice in art school was always toward reproducible things, making things that can be copied and that can be spread. When the Internet happened, it was like, “Oh, this is a Xerox machine times a million.”

PA: Your current exhibition at MoMA is titled Light. That word has a lot of meanings in your practice.

RR: My first exhibition was in Los Angeles in 2001. An artist there who had a project space and saw my work online invited me. I wasn’t even sure if it was real or a prank. And I arrived and it was a great moment. And because of that, I moved to LA, and then I moved to Berlin, and then I moved to Paris, and then I spent time in Tokyo. And it was always the idea that my laptop is my studio, which now is a little different. But the whole mantra was this lightweight lifestyle.

PA: You consider lightweight as a positive quality. Some people would think that lightweight is derogatory, especially around art.

RR: Well, words in the end are just words, and then a state of mind is something much deeper. I’m interested in the tension between finding the idea and working hard at it. You’re sketching and it’s not there. And then you take a walk or you go swim and all of a sudden, the idea arrives, and that’s the lightness that I’m attracted to.

PA: One feature of your digital abstractions that always leaves people slack-jawed is the file size, which of course also gets back to the exhibition title. How heavy is each file and how heavy is the whole exhibition at MoMA?

RR: Well, you remember from the early Internet that every byte counts because it would be loading time, and so I just always kept that ethos. Most of my works are under 10 kilobytes. All the works in the exhibition are 135KB combined. Then the blockchain happened and all of a sudden, size was relevant again, because you want to store the code on-chain and it’s very expensive. My ethos paid off again. But it’s a game to keep it simple and light, and it does give that feeling of instantly loading and you realize it’s not a video.

PA: It’s a generative algorithm. This kind of distinction, the fact that it’s not AI but it is generative, is meaningful. When we were trying to find a title for the show, you proposed many one-word titles that I really loved, and one of them was “easy.” There’s an ease in your work that is apparent, but in reality, it’s the distillation of years of this kind of life.

RR: Well, maybe the idea of easy is: if you find what really is you, then it comes naturally out of you. I have a proclivity for simplicity and bright colors. Art is the encounter of a person and a material. The person has intentions and wishes, and the material has intentions and wishes. And so if I approach painting, or a computer, I approach it differently than someone else.

PA: You’ve brought your ease to the many different kinds of materials you work with, whether paint and canvas or code. What is the thread that connects them all?

RR: I see it all as play. When I encounter composition, it’s interesting for me to go very close to abstraction but just find the point where it’s not, and that’s like a game of chess: I made this move. What move can I make after that?

PA: You once told me that, in your mind, modernism is the absence of narrative.

RR: I’m interested in comics for the elements of reduction, not in their storytelling. We grow up with narratives, and it makes things easier to understand, but it also causes stress thinking, “If you’re okay, then there must be tragedy soon.” We’re conditioned from movies to think that. Part of easiness and lightness is not expecting anything.

PA: We’re here in your studio, with your paintings, and the exhibition at MoMA is digital. It’s about code. So, do these projects start in different ways or do they stem from the same kind of thing?

RR: Everything starts from drawing. A lot of the way to remove narrative is to just start drawing. And I’ll often make the same drawings I’ve made before just to begin somewhere.

PA: I’ve always admired—more than admired, really loved—the fact that you want your work to be accessible everywhere by everybody and, at the same time, have its own value as art. Where does that stem from?

RR: When you start painting, history is so heavy. Then the Internet happened and that felt very freeing. I was like, “Oh, I’ll make a website filled with clouds. And if you touch the clouds, they disappear.” That is one of my early works. Many people have made paintings of clouds, but nobody made a website of clouds. So, that was this very free open space. And then I went to the library of my art school and I asked if they had a collection of CD-ROMs. They said, “Oh, no. We don’t collect CD-ROMs.” You can study the history of painting from books, you can understand the steps, but you cannot study moving images from books. If these works are not accessible, there will be no next step. There’s the empowering feeling of access, and then there’s the idea of building on previous ideas, and that works better if the art is visible.

PA: Did you have to educate yourself in any special way when you decided to approach websites?

RR: I first encountered the Internet when I was 16, and I had no idea how to do it. There was a Dutch TV channel that started a website that would invite artists to do experiments. They were saying, “This is a new medium. It’s not television.” Artists like JODI were there. In art school, we had coding classes and it turned out to be quite accessible, and so that was the empowering feeling. They showed us what FTP [File Transfer Protocol] software is, and it was actually much more approachable than publishing a book or opening a gallery.

Prudence Peiffer: Your website is a universal exhibition, but you’ve lived in so many different cities, including now New York. When did you move here?

RR: It was 2012. I had been in Tokyo and Paris. And every time I would go back to the Netherlands, I would feel lonely and I felt something was missing. I was tired of all the travel, and wanted to settle down. A friend of mine had a room on Elizabeth Street and said, “Come over for a month.” And then I met my wife. But also I never understood New York. I always thought, “It’s very expensive. The weather’s bad.”

PA: The weather’s bad compared to the Netherlands?!

RR: Ha, no, but compared to Rio, yeah! I didn’t see the value, but as I kept coming back, you meet more people, and then the dynamic energy and the idea of people, everyone coming here was very empowering. My whole ethos of lightness was also that I only worked an hour a day. The first 10 years, I was very obsessed with this idea of the sort of Duchampian genius: you just sit and smoke a pipe, and once every two years, you’re like, “That’s it.” New York changed me, I started thinking, “I’m not working to then relax at the beach. The work is more interesting than the beach.” And I think that’s what New York taught me, and now I just work all the time but very pleasantly.

PA: You went from Duchamp to Warhol.

RR: Yeah.

PP: New York will do that to you.

PA: How did you first become involved with screensavers?

RR: I thought a lot about different ways of exhibiting computer art. Video games, for example, are hard to exhibit because they can be a two-week experience, but screensavers are objects to stare at, which is the same thing you expect from a painting. You could stare at it for a second or you could stare at it for a week. The Nieuwe Institute in Rotterdam asked me to do something, but not as an artist. I invited one of the founders of After Dark, the company that made Flying Toasters and other screensavers, to come and we did a live interview. He talked about that fear when the computer turns off and crashes and the screen goes black, and then the feeling of hope after dark. So, the darkness, and then, “Oh, my computer didn’t crash and something is happening.” They never were working in the art ecosystem. They were very commercial; they would go to a trade show, demoing the first screensavers. Everyone’s setting up their booth with printers and there’s this booth with screensavers, and people said, “That’s ridiculous. No one needs that.” And then, as time went on, people started crowding around and saying, “Oh, is it looping? No, it’s not looping!” And it became a cultural phenomenon. I was interested in screensavers as this weird space of very free thinking but very unpretentious.

AF: And on that note, how do you navigate the fact that the Internet is constantly changing?

RR: It is changing, and it’s not. Yesterday we were talking about how email newsletters are so powerful right now. Social media happened and it grabs a lot of attention, but it turns out email is still really strong. People think of the Internet as temporary until there’s a really bad photo of you and it’s on the Internet forever. My biggest struggle with the Internet is that it’s designed to take your attention, and that’s a constant. I have software on my computer to shut everything off for a number of hours during the day. It’s really the brightest minds in the world fighting for your attention. That’s a pretty tough battle.

PP: In another interview you were talking about how physical artworks are in many ways more virtual than digital ones because they live in storage or with a private collector so much of the time, and this really made me rethink how we define the material presence of artworks.

RR: There’s this presumption that digital is fragile, that digital is virtual, but when you really think about it, it’s the opposite. When you compare it to music, it’s very easy to understand. Let’s say you never heard of David Bowie.

PP: Poor soul.

RR: Then you can go on Spotify. It might not be the original vinyl, but you can grasp his whole body of work and all the changes that happened through the decades. Or maybe a living artist is an even better example and you learn their catalog and then you go to a concert. And the concert is a special experience, but it’s ephemeral. The recordings are there, and they live on and they’re part of your life. We don’t think of the recordings being a lesser thing than the concert; they’re cumulative.

Where a successful artwork is also, kind of, tragic. The viewer can never—or rarely—experience it by themselves. So, if you really want to spend time with Vincent van Gogh’s Postman, it’s going to be tough. With digital work, you have this benefit of growing with it at home and then seeing the concert version.

RR: There’s a painter from the Netherlands, Pieter Saenredam. After the Reformation, all the churches were emptied, and he mostly painted empty spaces. I didn’t think about this, but when you look at my work, there’s a lot of empty space. I wondered if this was a political work made to promote the Reformation, but my father said it’s more someone geeking out on architecture and light and that being possible because of the removal of all the ornamentation.

PP: Do you think of your websites as empty spaces?

RR: Well, I do think websites are places, yeah. It feels like somewhere you go.

PP: Do you see your websites as having almost a meditative quality, asking for a different kind of attention than most of the Internet?

RR: Well, I always saw them as dead ends. The Internet is full of connections, and then you get to this road and you’re just stuck there.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Light: Rafaël Rozendaal is on view at MoMA through spring 2025.