Looking At Something
screenshot of Rafael Rozendaal’s net art looking at something from http://www.lookingatsomething.com
Looking at something is an interactive net art created by Rafael Rozendaal. In this art work, the initial scene is a dark rainy weather along with the sound of raining. The scene changes as audiences move their mouses. When mouse is going horizontally, no matter to left or right, the track of the rains will follow the mouse and then go back to straight falling in a few seconds. When mouse is going up, the rain will be much less and the background will become brighter, as the mouse reaches the peak, the rain will stop along with the tweets of birds. When mouse is going down, it will rain much heavily and the background will become darker along with the sound of lightning.
Looking at something creates a direct feeling of weather changes by using both sound and frames as the primary representations for different weathers. For example, when the birds tweets appear, the background becomes brighter, the audiences can easily feel the sunny day comes after raining. The primary focus of Looking at something is to provide an unique opportunity for audiences to interact with the net art by simply moving the mouse in different directions.
Jepson Center describes Looking at something in TELFAIR MUSEUMS:
“Rozendaal’s work has been shown internationally in venues including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Venice Bienalle, and Seoul Art Square. His work has been covered extensively in media including Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Wired, Flash Art, Vogue, and the Creator’s Project. Rozendaal is also the creator of BYOB (Bring Your Own Beamer), a rapidly expanding series of curated projection exhibitions.”JEPSON CENTER (2014, Nov.23) http://www.telfair.org/looking-at-something/
In one of other projects created by Rafael Rozendaal, Float Bounce, he also designs an interactive net art that could controlled by audiences. In a colorful page with primary purple and blue, audiences can click anywhere in the page to create a moving and rotating sphere, when the sphere touches the edge, it will bounce back and keep moving. Compared with Looking at something, they are both interactive and created for the audiences to make their own designs. Both use the repeatable objects to create a scene that could give audiences a directly understanding about what they could do on the website.
In another net art designed by Rollin Leonard, he also uses repeat object to create the website. He fills the website page with self portraits in different kinds of shapes. All of these are dynamic and in a well organization that make this website look humorous. Different from what Rafael Rozendaal does, Rollin Leonard plays a lot with the self portrait and create a fantasy performance to audience instead of making it interactive.
List of exhibitions
Kawasaki City Museum, Japan
Centre Pompidou, paris
The Venice Bienalle, and Seoul Art Square
Additional
other relevant images
screenshot of Rafael Rozendaal’s net art looking at something from http://www.lookingatsomething.com
