Artist Rafaël Rozendaal’s compellingly laconic haikus receive physical publication

Artist Rafaël Rozendaal has published a collection of haikus, the culmination of a two year multi-media project. The “non physical artworks” first appeared as Tweets, then as Instagram and blog posts before being featured as part of Steve Turner’s Los Angeles exhibition Abstract Browsing earlier this year. Largely written on Rafaël’s phone, the compact poems range in subject matter from touching existential musings on the complexities of the digital age to the mundane pleasure of ignoring emails or getting paid on time. 

Long interested in Japanese culture, Rafaël was drawn to “the humbleness in the choice of medium” of Japanese artists, where repetition renders the physical entity of less importance and draws parallels with web. “The internet for me is about freedom, freedom not to own stuff and still access the best texts, images, films, music, all the things that matter to me.” Before the project, he had a very limited relationship with poetry (although it could be argued registering 100 domain names over the course of 15 years is a form of succinct writing), but saw a way into through the similarities between haikus and computational processes. “Each time the haiku is read, a moment happens, the algorithm runs, the three lines of code start a process in the mind of the reader,” he explains.

Rafaël, who’s based in New York, specialises in creating browser-based artworks, which accrue a whopping 40 million unique visits per year. His recent projects have included transforming website wireframes into patterned tapestries via a custom-built plugin and tweeting the contents of every meal he’s eaten since August 2008 (the current total is 8,883). The offset 160-page book has been published by Rollo Press in collaboration with the Margit Säde-curated exhibition DOings&kNOTs at Tallinn Art Hall.