Title: Rafael Rozendaal

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1WYmEKhG0fqSd7LQqdfFt-O-uIZnrCyDYew7B0ieIVHU/edit?usp=sharing

Net Art: In Your Own Words
I understand Net Art as a form of artistic expression that is native to the internet. It’s not just traditional art uploaded online—it’s made to live and breathe in the browser. Artists use code, interactivity, and the web’s global reach to create experiences that are often playful, experimental, and thought-provoking. Net Art invites people to not just look at art but to engage with it, click on it, even shape it. It’s about connection, curiosity, and the digital world as both a canvas and a place.

Introduction
Rafael Rozendaal is a digital pioneer who has helped shape what Net Art looks like today. Known for his colorful, interactive websites, Rozendaal works across mediums—both digital and physical—but always follows the same process: curiosity first. When he starts a project, he doesn’t always know where it will go. He just starts drawing, thinking, or coding—and lets the work evolve naturally.

He uses both simple sketches and advanced programming to explore minimalism, interactivity, and emotion. The visual style of his websites often includes gradients, geometric shapes, and satisfying movement. He makes work that is accessible to everyone, saying, “I want to make art that everyone can understand.” Whether viewed on a phone or a huge public screen, his art remains vivid, personal, and open to interpretation.

Rozendaal studied fine art in the Netherlands and takes inspiration from cartoons, pop culture, Japanese aesthetics, and 90s internet culture. He believes websites are not just tools but “places” that we can visit—spaces where time, interaction, and experience come together. This philosophy shapes how he treats the web not just as a display surface but as a living environment.

Conceptual and Historical Context
Rozendaal belongs to the Net Art movement, which began in the 1990s when artists started exploring the internet as a new artistic space. Unlike traditional media, Net Art was born out of interactivity, code, and the global reach of the web. Artists could bypass galleries and directly connect with viewers from around the world.

Rozendaal’s most famous contribution is selling websites as artworks. He assigns them unique domain names, sells ownership certificates to collectors, and still keeps the websites free for everyone to view. This radically reimagines the concept of ownership and accessibility in art—blurring the lines between public and private, collectible and shareable.

Discussion: Connection to Reading and CCLab
In the reading Agents of Change, artist Robert Adrian said, “It’s not about things, it’s about connections.” That perfectly describes Rozendaal’s work. His websites invite users to click, hover, or interact in ways that feel intuitive yet meaningful. His art only exists when the user engages—it’s alive through connection, just like what we’re doing in CCLab with p5.js sketches and interactive canvases.

Rozendaal’s process of starting with drawings and translating them into code mirrors our own journey. Sometimes, it’s easy to get stuck on the screen. Going back to sketching, thinking offline, and then translating ideas into code can help spark something more personal and unique. He reminds us that the technical side is just a tool—the emotion still comes first.

Conclusion
Rozendaal’s work has helped me reimagine the internet not just as a tool but as a space—an emotional, expressive, and interactive world. His approach to making websites into places that people can “visit” and “play with” has directly influenced how I think about my own work in Project B.

As I build my own net art piece—a website meant to travel 1000 years into the future—I realize that the goal isn’t just to create something that looks cool or works perfectly. The real goal is to send a message, an emotion, or even a moment of curiosity into the future. Rozendaal teaches us that art doesn’t have to be complicated to be meaningful. Sometimes, the simplest forms, the most basic gestures—like a click or a drag—can create a connection across space and time.