Rafaël Rozendaal redesigns how we view the internet with an exhibition of tapestries and haikus

Digital artist Rafaël Rozendaal is turning the internet inside out with an exhibition at Steve Turner Los Angeles. His third solo exhibition at the gallery, Abstract Browsing allows the audience to view the internet through Rafaël’s unique perspective.

Fascinated and inspired by the back-end of our online world, Rafaël uses a plugin of his own creation to view the wireframe of any website he chooses. Searching for unexpected compositions and the discovery of “weird hybrids of human design and machine optimising,” he considers pixels on a screen akin to stitches on a tapestry and proceeds to create his own vibrant Jacquard woven artworks reflecting his most intriguing finds.

Juxtaposing his technically complex tapestries, Rafaël celebrates the short-form triumphs of the internet with haikus consisting simply of vinyl letters applied directly onto the walls of the gallery. Although he appreciates how perfectly suited haikus are to the chaotic movement of Twitter, Rafaël considers his exhibition and the gallery a welcome refuge from the frantic nature of the internet and presents his work as an opportunity to reflect on and contemplate the architecture of the web without the associated distractions.

An interesting progression from his in-browser digital artworks and subsequent lenticular paintings, Rafaël’s Abstract Browsing is on display at Steve Turner until 6 February 2016.