Rafael Rozendaal

Early life

Born in Amsterdam in 1980 to two artists, Rozendaal naturally picked up drawing and painting from a young age. As a young boy Rozendaal’s uncle would buy his drawings for a bit of small change. Rozendaal quickly discovered that selling his work meant that he would never see his creation again. This led him to turn to printmaking, allowing him to still keep a copy for himself. This belief of Rozendaal’s was furthermore awakened with the invention of the internet, which served as a free space to connect with potential audiences.
Rozendaal attended the Art Academy in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and graduated in 2002.

Artistic practice

Rozendaal’s artistic practice is most well known for his moving images and websites. However, he also expands to art installations, drawings, articles and lectures. He describes his works as: “researching the screen as a pictorial space, reverse engineering reality into condensed bits, in a space somewhere between animated cartoons and paintings. His installations involve moving light and reflections, taking online works and transforming them into spatial experiences.” His websites generate online traffic of over 40 million unique visits per year.

BYOB

Rozendaal also founded BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), an open source exhibition concept. The idea is that anyone can create an exhibition of media art without any budget; the manual of BYOB reads: "Find a space, Invite many artists, Ask them to bring their projector". With this concept Rozendaal wanted to bring the internet to a real life physical space and allow viewers to "‘walk through the internet". Since its beginning in 2010, more than 150 BYOB events were organized around the world.

Selling websites

Rafael Rozendaal is one of the first artists to sell websites as art objects. His websites are sold to art collectors, who then own the domain name of that work. Both the artist and the collector sign a contract that the work has to remain publicly accessible. The name of the collector is placed in the source code and the title of the webpage. Rozendaal created the Art Website Sales Contract which is a public document that can be used by any artist or collector to help in the selling of public website art. Rozendaal’s http://www.ifnoyes.com website was recently sold at an auction at Phillips (auctioneers) in New York.