Major solo exhibition from Rafaël Rozendaal, Permanent Distraction, is open 23 September - 19 December at Site.
Permanent Distraction was the first solo exhibition of Rafaël Rozendaal’s work in the UK and his most expansive installation to that date.
The exhibition presented the most extensive installation of Rozendaal’s websites series in a new immersive environment. Existing and newly produced websites have come together in a commissioned, site-specific installation. The websites were shown as twelve, floor to ceiling projections, filling the space with constantly generating abstract colour, movement and gesture.
The exhibition presented the most extensive installation of Rozendaal’s websites series in a new immersive environment. Existing and newly produced websites have come together in a commissioned, site-specific installation. The websites were shown as twelve, floor to ceiling projections, filling the space with constantly generating abstract colour, movement and gesture.
Permanent Distraction forced us to confront the slippage between our physical and digital realities, bringing bodies physically into the space of the internet. Rozendaal pushed us to think about physical interaction with the internet, confronting what we thought of as real, and what IRL (in real life) means when we now spend so much of our lives online.
Rozendaal’s websites had distinctive qualities unlike any other art medium, they were publicly accessible, unique objects that existed all over the world simultaneously. In the gallery or on an iPhone screen, they were one and the same, websites ever changing and generating, sometimes featuring and projecting out large in the gallery.
The exhibition also featured everything I eat I tweet, a Twitter stream that Rozendaal had been running since 2008, where he tweeted everything he ate. The work played on the growing invasion of social media with the banality of most interactions. It was a live diary process, played out in public.
As well as visiting the gallery to view the exhibition, you could get involved with Permanent Distraction by taking part in some of our themed events, workshops and talks. You could attend skills-based workshops such as our family-friendly animation workshop, visit our collaborative music event with Sensoria Fesitval, and sign up for an immersive experience with award-winning female sound collective SONA.
View Rafaël Rozendaal’s series of online works here.
Photo credit: Jules Lister
Artists
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazillian visual artist who uses the internet as his canvas. Since 1999 Rozendaal has been making websites as artworks, unique abstract compositions coded with ever generating algorithms. His websites attract 40 million visits per year. He also creates installations, tapestries, lenticulars, haiku, lectures, and a podcast.
He’s exhibited in Times Square, and Centre Pompidou, Valencia Biennial, Casa Franca Brasil Rio, TSCA Gallery Tokyo, Seoul Art Square and Stedelijk Museum amongst others.
Rozendaal is a pioneer in the idea of collecting digital art in the form of websites. Since first creating these digital works, they have been sold to collectors who become the owners via a dedicated domain name. His early and ongoing digital sales served as a precursor to NFTs, predicting the idea of digital art collecting. Now Rozendaal uses hosts Artblocks to produce NFTs, in particular a series that has gone on raise over $400K for arts and tech organisation Rhizome.
