Finally!

I have been searching the internets for years and I found it, a Towelie towel! (Affiliate link)

From Wikipedia:
Trey Parker and Matt Stone explained on the DVD commentary for “Towelie” that the character was conceived as a joking reference to the over-marketing of characters in the wake of the series’ success. Eric Cartman delivers the penultimate line of Towelie’s eponymous episode: “You’re the worst character ever, Towelie,” to which Towelie responds, “I know”.

Every frame from Please Touch Me .com (2005)

I decided to unfriend everyone on my private Facebook account. Facebook is a big distraction and this is the best way for me to deal with it. It’s too tempting, I’m always curious what’s going on.

I couldn’t delete my account because my public page has a lot of followers and I want to continue publishing there.

OK, back to work!

I’m excited to let you know I will be showing a selection of works on the video wall of Salon 94.
6 of my websites will be playing day and night for a month.

The gallery is right next to the New Museum on the Bowery in New York.

This Friday my presentation will be launched together with the opening of Takuro Kuwata’s exhibition.

Arranged by Mark Brown.

Salon 94
243 Bowery
New York, NY, 10002
Opening: Friday, January 18, 6 – 8 pm.

Back in 2004 I moved to Los Angeles. I shared a studio with Jonathan Maghen and we started a T-shirt line called Tagbanger.

As artists, we were most excited about creating images. It was a nice form of collaboration, we both created and found images and then we would sit together and review the ideas. Sometimes we would execute the ideas together, sometimes separately. We found a great printer who used waterbased inks, we found a great T-shirt manufacturer, and we had nice labels made.

What we underestimated is that a business requires a lot more than just creating a product.

I tried going to stores to offer them our shirts but I would just feel awkward. And the logistics were not easy either.

We sold quite a few shirts but it never became a big thing that we could do fulltime. I really admire artists who are able to create a business of consumer oriented art products. In simple words: affordable art that anyone can buy.

Below are all the T-shirts we made. It was great fun and we made some money, and I learned a lot.

Brand New: Text Free Browsing, a chrome extension by Rafaël Rozendaal & Jonas Lund.

Text Free Browsing does what the name says: once you install it, you can click on a little nerdy face to turn off all text on the internet. You can turn TextFree on and off on at any moment. Try it!

You can download it for free in the Chrome Web Store

Finger Battle, the simplest game in the universe, has just been updated to fit all the iScreens:

iPhone, iPhone5, iPad, iPad mini…

You can challenge anyone on any iDevice now!

The update is available for free to anyone who has bought Finger Battle already.
If you don’t have Finger Battle yet, go get it at the iTunes store, it’s only 99 cents!

I am working on a series of Lenticular Prints. These test prints came in yesterday.

Nakitu Minayashi is a book of poetry by Nikola Tosic.

The book consists of one very long poem.
Each page has 10 lines. There are 1000 pages.
All together the poem is 10,000 lines long.

The entire text is lowercase, no punctuation, and set in Arial.

The book was printed 150 times and costs 150 euros.
It is absolutely worth it. I own the first edition.

You can read the entire book online at Nakitu Minayashi .com.
The site remembers which page you were reading, when you come back later you can continue where you left off.

You can read more of Nikola’s poems on his poetry website.

I have always really liked his poems.
I wish I could explain why I like them.

It’s not easy to explain why you like things.
I can’t tell you why I like orange juice, but I can guarantee you that like orange juice.

Success seems exponential to me… exponential growth… it’s hard to imagine how one artist makes hardly any money and another artist can build a multi billion dollar franchise. I’m just amazed that such a franchise starts with the enthusiasm and ideas of a single person.

Movie directors are like super heroes, they must have magical powers to make big things happen…
I have no idea how they do it… amazing!

Dear you,

I am looking for a New York based intern.

Someone who is happy / organized / loves computers / doesn’t smoke.

There are lots of things to do and learn. This internship would involve helping out with BYOB activities & archive and doing research for new websites, apps, exhibitions, and anything else that comes up.

I would love to hear from you, please send me an email if you are interested. Tell me about yourself and what you like to do, what software you know well, what your plans are, things like that.

Happy holidays!

The Paint Shop .biz is a website by Jonas Lund.

It’s a simple online tool to create a painting and offer it for sale immediately. You paint in a rectangle and confirm, and whoever buys it receives a printed canvas. Technically it’s not painting, it’s a print, but who cares, it sounds better this way. Lots of interesting artists participated, including me 🙂

The Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven is showing 1000 paintings from The Paint Shop .biz this week, if you are in the area go see it!

My friends at OKFoc.us made a cool new website: Overlayer.com

It’s pretty simple:

With your webcam, you can take a picture with an “overlayer”, a transparent picture frame.

You can also add your own overlays, which is even cooler.

You can see my overlays here. Give it a try and send me your pics!

4 laptops playing into time .gif

I just got back home.

It was the first time I flew around the world in 24 days:
New York – Tokyo – London – Paris – Amsterdam – New York

Some thoughts:

– I love flying, even if I’m stuck in a small chair for 13 hours. I just love it. It’s magical and amazing.
– Japan is the best, it simply is. Geek heaven. I wouldn’t want to live there but I don’t mind going there a few times per year.
– I was quite nervous about two big brand projects (a Calvin Klein exhibition in Tokyo and a car project which I can’t tell you about yet), but everything worked out great and now I feel very relaxed.
– Paris is beautiful and I love to go there any time.
– When I travel I eat about twice as much.
– It’s difficult to keep up with emails, exercise, documentation, administration, contacts, while on the road.
– It was weird being in Amsterdam. Everything is familiar, I know every detail, but it’s not home. I’m not sure if New York is home, but it will be my base for the next few years. Perhaps I should just not think about the idea of “home”.
– East to West JetLag is quite OK. I kept flying east which made my sleep transition easy.
– New York looks cool at night.

Now I have to get back into my regular schedule, make new work, run, enjoy New York. Turn off social networks on my computer and FOCUS.

2012 has been an amazing year so far, thank you to everyone involved!

The Useless Web .com is a website that links to useless websites.

It links to a few of my sites.
Since it launched, my visits have increased 800%.
I’m almost at 1/2 million visits per day now.

This website proves that simplicity really works on the web. K.I.S.S.

I’ve seen many online exhibitions but this is the best one so far.

I found this picture somewhere on the internet…
Who knows who it is? How cool is the internet?
Someone looking at my work somewhere…

“Without Hesitation”, Tokyo Japan, 2012.

An interactive art installation by Rafaël Rozendaal.

Thank you CK

Everyone who blogs probably knows this feeling: talking is easier than writing. I have a huge list of unfinished blog posts. I always hold back because I wonder “Will anyone care about this?”

It is easy to talk about ideas when you meet people, because they are in front of you. You can see their face and you can gage if they are interested in what you are bringing to the table.

Writing to an online audience… I start to feel self conscious quickly.

From now on I’m gonna try not to care too much and just write anything that comes to mind.

I am on my way to Japan! I am doing a special secret exhibition in Tokyo, more on that later.

I am very very excited… after hurricane stress in New York I am ready for the best sushi, shabu shabu, donburi, soba, miso soup, tsukiyaki, mochi, omurice, ramen, tonkatsu, tempura, yakitori, bento, edamame, ikura, tofu, and anything I can try that I have not tried before.

Japan is the best!

Hello to all of you. Thank you for all the kind emails and messages related to hurricane Sandy.

I just wanted to let you know that I’m OK. If you were worried about me, don’t worry. Lower Manhattan is without electricity so I’m staying in Brooklyn for a few days.

In my area (Chinatown/LittleItaly) things were not that bad. Electricity is down for a few days but cabs are driving and I did not see any broken buildings. Some things broke, but it didn’t look that bad. I did not go to see the real danger areas near the water…

Good luck and thank you to all who are rebuilding what’s broken.

Times Square Art Square is a group of people with an ambitious dream: They want to turn Times Square in New York City into a gigantic public exhibition, one month per year. Times Square is one of the busiest spots on earth, and therefore it is saturated with moving billboards. These screens could also show art. That is the mission of Times Square Art Square.

I am excited to be the first artist involved, and I really hope this dream becomes a reality very soon. You can help by spreading the word and by contributing on the Kickstarter page.

Let’s make it happen!

Malevich is an artist who took some very interesting turns in his work. He painted the world’s first monochrome (his black square) and took radical and bold steps in painting. After full abstraction he went back to figuration.

I have always wondered what Malevich was thinking when he was painting this painting. It is a very funny image; two men in the exact same outfit and their beards waving in the wind.

I think Malevich must have been a very funny guy.

Hi @yyolk,

My coding knowledge is tiny. Smaller than a pimple on a fruitfly.

I remember trying to code in 2000/2001. I could play a bit with framesets in html, and “gotoFrame” in Flash. But then it just felt like there was a wall I had to learn to climb. I just wasn’t motivated, or I don’t have the talent. Probably a bit of both.

I don’t know css, I know maybe 3 tags in html, and I know how to do “goto random frame” in Flash. That is my total knowledge of coding.

I remember seeing a discussion at the New Museum, about the question “should everyone know how to code”? After all, our world is more and more digital so not knowing how to code is like being illiterate?

I don’t know if I would make better work if I was coding it myself. I was very lucky to meet nice people who’ve helped me, in particular Reinier Feijen. He is very friendly and patient and he enjoys the process of solving visual puzzles.

I do know that I’m running out of time as is, so it’s good for me to work together with people.

The Art Website Sales Contract is a document I created in 2011. I use it when I sell one of my art websites. The document is both the certificate of authenticty, and a legally binding document between the artist and the art collector. Selling websites as art pieces is still very new, and I hope this document can help any artist who want to sell their art this way.

I think selling a moving image in a domain name is an elegant solution: the work is available to the public, and the ownership is unique, because domain names are unique.

I recently revised the text of the contract together with Steve Turner, my gallerist in LA. We simplified the document, keeping the original ideas but making the text more straight forward.

The document is free to download. (pdf link)

AND (Abandon Normal Devices) Festival is a summer Festival that happens in several cities in the UK each year. They always ask artists to make new work, and this year they asked me to make a series of ten animated gifs for their blog. They were posted week by week onder the name Happy Mondays.

Here they are all together:

I’m on my way to Los Angeles.

I’m happy to go there again and eat some tacos.

I will also work on my exhibition at Steve Turner Contemporary, hope to see you there!

I am happy to let you know about my exhibition
“Everything Always Everywhere”
at Steve Turner Contemporary.

I will be there and I hope to see you!

Press release:

Rafaël Rozendaal
Everything Always Everywhere
September 8 – October 6, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 8, 2012, 6 – 8 PM
Steve Turner Contemporary
6026 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90036

Steve Turner Contemporary is a contemporary art gallery based in Los Angeles that represents the work of emerging and established contemporary artists. Gallery hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11- 6. Please contact the gallery for further information.

I’m happy to be part of the group exhibition Bright Lights After Armageddon, curated by Mark Brown.

The show features works by Anne de Vries, Michael Bell Smith, Travess Smalley and me.
I love all of the artists in the show and I think you will too.

Opening:
Thursday, September 13, 7 – 9 pm
Pablo’s Birthday
25 Cleveland Place, New York

Here is the exhibition text by Mark Brown:

What if we are living in the end times, but as Joseph Campbell wrote, “Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end”? What if rather than an all-consuming fire, Armageddon is a scintillating brightness, illuminating the first stirrings of a much better future? Could the day after Armageddon be the most beautiful day ever?

Maybe it is all a matter of a change in perception. If the Apocalypse is soon to come, perhaps we should be welcoming Armageddon. As in the Hindu myth, where the destruction of the world at the end of the restless and turbulent satya yuga era ushers in a new world of peace and enlightenment, the day after Armageddon may be much brighter than the day before.

I love finding ideas, so I try to find methods to push myself… more ideas, better ideas, whatever that means.

I like using a sketchbook to get ideas out of my head. Usually sketching helps, so now I made a deal with myself: every day, for at least an hour, I have sit somewhere without internet and sketch for an hour.

So far it has helped a bit, but it is also very daunting. After all, this is the era of self publishing. You don’t need a movie studio to make a film, you don’t need a publisher to share your novel with the world. Just put it on the internet.

The tools are cheaper and easier every day, and the only limit is your own motivation and talent.

This is great, but is also very intimidating.

When I sit and I have a pen in my hand but there are no ideas, it’s not a great feeling.

When the ideas do come, it makes me happy.

Over the next two months I will be releasing one animated .gif per week as an online project for AND festival. This is the first one.

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) is an energetic regional festival of new cinema, digital culture and art in Liverpool.