Abstract Browsing and Rafaël Rozendaal's web-native practice

2001

Artists: Rafaël Rozendaal · Year: 2001 · Medium: Web-native art — single-page websites at custom domains, each a distinct interactive abstract artwork · Substrate: HTML/JavaScript web pages; dedicated domain names; artworks sold with their domains as certificate of provenance · Place: New York, USA / distributed · Institution: Independent; multiple galleries Rafaël Rozendaal, a Dutch-Brazilian artist based in New York, has since 2001 maintained a practice built around the idea that individual websites can be artworks — distinct, discrete, purchasable, each with its own domain name and its own internal behavior. Rozendaal's personal portfolio currently lists over 130 such sites. Each has a unique dot-com URL (e.g., ifnoyes.com, 1111hours.com, abstractbrowsing.net). Each was programmed by Rozendaal himself. Each has been sold to a private collector who owns the URL and the hosting obligation — including the obligation to keep the site online in perpetuity — while Rozendaal retains authorship credit and a portion of any resale income. Abstract Browsing (2014 onward, though conceptually developed from earlier work) is Rozendaal's most consequential single series. It is a browser extension that, when activated, strips every webpage of its imagery, typography, and text, replacing them with the colored geometric blocks that the page's underlying HTML structure specifies. A New York Times article becomes a Mondrian. A Gmail inbox becomes a de Stijl composition. The extension runs live on whatever page the viewer is browsing. Rozendaal has also produced a corresponding series of woven rugs, each documenting a specific Abstract Browsing capture of a well-known website at a specific date, and a book (Abstract Browsing, Hatje Cantz, 2018). What Rozendaal argues is that the web is already abstract painting, but the browser is hiding it behind legibility. The extension is not a translation; it is a revelation. What an HTML page is, underneath, is a nested geometric composition of boxes. Rozendaal's practice — sites, rugs, the book — is to make that structure directly visible as the aesthetic fact it always already was. The work has had an outsized influence on younger net-based artists, particularly a generation that came up seeing Rozendaal's sites in their browsers and understanding, for the first time, that a website could be a singular artwork rather than a container for content. He continues to release new sites, now typically four to six per year. Lore Rozendaal sells each of his sites through a formal contract that includes a hosting obligation the buyer must fulfill — the site must remain online, at its domain, in perpetuity, or ownership reverts. Several have been purchased by the Whitney Museum, MoMA, and the Stedelijk. The first sale, sardinesandscrewdrivers.com in 2005, went to a private collector for $1,000; later sales have reached the low six figures. Rozendaal funds his practice partly through the sales and partly through a parallel career making large-scale woven rugs and lenticular prints. He is in his forties, based in New York, and shows with Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles and Takuro Someya Contemporary Art in Tokyo. Sources • Rozendaal, Rafaël — Abstract Browsing (Hatje Cantz, 2018). • Whitney Museum of American Art — Rafaël Rozendaal collection files. • Rozendaal, Rafaël — newrafael.com (artist archive).