Website; code by Reinier Feijen. Private Collection.
paper toilet .com is a website-as-artwork consisting of an interactive depiction of a roll of toilet paper. The artwork is stark in its simplicity, both visually and interactively, as the only animations consist of unrolling the toilet paper via a mouse scroll and double clicking to restart the experience. In its unadorned candor, paper toilet .com is a reminder of how the internet was, and still can be, a rich site of experimentation and play, rather than algorithmic flattening and optimization. In the artist’s own words, paper toilet .com was made for “Interactivity for its own sake, not towards any goal other than the interaction itself.”
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian artist based in New York. Since the early 2000s he has worked primarily on the open web, treating the browser as a pictorial field and code as a material on par with paint. His earliest pieces, single-purpose websites such as paper toilet .com (2006) and jello time .com (2007), set the terms of a practice that has since expanded across lenticulars, tapestries, installations, NFTs, and painting, with each medium routed back through a fascination with screen-bound motion and interactivity.