→ untitled[rhizome] (2000) by @JanRobertLeegte 🔗 rhizome.leegte.org By removing the content while leaving behind traces, structural tags, and layout markers, Leegte explored the raw materiality and underlying architecture of early web pages. Trained as a sculptor and influenced by minimalism, he approached digital interfaces as spatial and structural objects rather than mere text or image canvases.

⭑ Abstraction After the dot com boom, new business models emerged. In the mid-2000s and into the 2010s, the first social media platforms were founded and began drastically changing the way we interact with the web. ‘Surfing’ the web was replaced with ‘scrolling’, and the depth of the rabbit holes that one would previously wander into were flattened into feeds. The theme of Abstraction is a double-entendre that addresses both an aesthetic trend and a technopolitical one. Creatively, the 2010s experienced a wave of artists using websites to display code-based generative artworks, which were often visually abstract. Websites became the vitrines for live, web-native generative visuals that could be experienced and displayed by anyone, anywhere in the world, with an internet connection. However, ‘abstraction’ can also refer to the abstraction of technology, the act of blackboxing and hiding away complex algorithms and processes in order to present seamless user experiences, often to the detriment of the individual. The artists working in Abstraction use the browser as a space for both visual exploration and scrutiny. We encounter the beauty of computational processes alongside a less comfortable question: how much of the technology we use every day can we actually see or understand? WORKS: → Die (2026) by @0xShiroi → paper toilet .com (2006) by @newrafael → Monogrid 0.1 (2021 - 2026) by @kimasendorf → internet.flowers (2025) by @100o111 → Mira (2005) by @liasomething

Now on view → "Books" by @newrafael Rafael Rozendaal's exhibition "Books" is now open at Upstream Gallery in Amsterdam. The paintings arrive at a time when visual stimulation feels constant. Rafael treats absence as an opportunity rather than a lack, using the blank page as space for new work. He describes focus as the most valuable resource in an attention economy. For more information, visit the link below 👇

Artists You Should Know → .✦ ݁˖ @JanRobertLeegte.✦ ݁˖ Jan Robert Leegte (b. 1973, Netherlands) is a Dutch artist living and working in Amsterdam, and one of the first artists in the Netherlands to make work on and for the internet, starting in the 1990s. He describes his practice in three words: sculpting the internet. He approaches the browser as a sculptor approaches stone, as a material with weight, grain and resistance. His recurring subject is the sculptural materiality of interfaces: scrollbars, cursors, menus, drop shadows, table borders, selection highlights, broken images. The elements we look through every day without ever looking at. Trained first in architecture and then at the Willem de Kooning Academy, he treats these interface components the way an architect treats ornament, and situates the results in the lineages of minimal art, land art and conceptualism. Since 2002 he has also worked in the other direction, translating web-based pieces into physical sculptures, installations and projections. His Scrollbar Composition (2000) is in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and is included in the Dutch digital art canon. His work appears in Christiane Paul's Digital Art (Thames & Hudson) and has been shown at Electronic Superhighway (Whitechapel Gallery, London), Open Codes (ZKM Karlsruhe), MAAT Lisbon, iMal Brussels, MOTI Breda and Upstream Gallery Amsterdam. He will be part of WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES! (WWW!) Opening September 21st in NY. websiteswebsiteswebsites.net… ↓ Below is an overview of his past projects