# Did You Forget About Functionality? 
Published: 2025-10-02
Canonical: https://journal.xiaotianfanx.com/journal/did-you-forget-about-functionality

On  Functionality, Forget about Functionality , an essay by Marti Manen, commenting on artist Rafaël Rozendaal.  yeah totally   i know   for sure?  	I found it so very ironic as well as pleasing to see these three lines at the end of the essay. Not only does everything (in the essay) make more sense, but this tiny meta-storytelling has also brought, eventually, what the essay claims to have had all along.  	Maybe it's just my occasional (lack of?) sensitivity again, yet what was really happening to me before hitting the last few lines while reading the essay and probing through one and another website piece of Rozendaal is the contrary of 'emotion,' which is something, at least in the essay, emphasized here and there.  	By all means, I'm not saying that I didn't enjoy the essay or the websites. There are many personally related things that the essay touches on: from the (art or not) institution, its evolution/adaptability, and the audience relationship to how the internet makes everything and every moment now, forever, but also grows rapidly enough exponentially faster than a rather fixed rate of consumption (or, in nowadays terms, attention)—resonating with a Deleuzian crystal of time where at any given "present" instant, we are simultaneously experiencing the present becoming future and the present becoming past; how 'artists' live their lives as an artwork; and the tension between the live and the recording that I also experience as a musician and a music producer.  	As for the websites, I myself have been a practitioner of "the website as the piece" philosophy for a while; the idea of concept (title, or domain in Rozendaal's case) vs. content/idea (variations, encoding-decoding, abstraction-ramifications, and interactivity) has been a theme of mine when it comes to artistic (or not) expressions, and it was indeed challenging to refrain myself from fiddling around with  Rozendaal's websites  and experimenting with the possibilities. That being said, the soundness of both the essay and the websites grasped me from a second-order perspective when I intuitively appreciated them in terms of how they are well-said, well-built, and well-written—instead of the first-order experience.  	The reason behind this phenomenon could vary from my personal habit (or vice?) to approach to things, the technical perspective that automatically shifts my focus to what is behind the visuals, and to how the insightful notions back then in 2016-2017 could have become platitudes these days. Amongst those potential reasons, my personal favorite is how the essay and the art practice are somewhat the exact embodiment of what they seem to 'against' or 'defy' to some extent (in my limited opinion)—until the last three lines punch in.  	Indeed, I have to admit that I was amazed by the World Wild West analogy when it comes to the web, commercialization, and profit-making (and I guess this analogy is more suitable than ever for the GAI and AGI hype today). Nevertheless, while the artist seems to promote the alternatives—removing 'info' from the 'websites' and prioritizing the ideas, questioning how the pieces are inevitably misinterpreted when entering institutions as video loops, and realizing that "the self-promotion becomes the art" in the capitalized/commercialized economic era—some of the practice is inextricably a part of the bad reality, namely the Times Square 3-minute Kiss.  	The storytelling in the essay is for sure rhetorically proficient and interpretationally tenable. However, I simply cannot ignore the mere fact that to let the ever-changing and the ever-crowded Times Square pause and let the 3-minute Kiss happen, it is not even close to plain, simple, slow, or conceptual purity—the happening is precisely built upon the complex commercial mechanism and ideology Times Square represents. In other words,  the choice to be  and the resource  to present as  simple, pure, and logo-less is a great very privilege.  	Well, privileged or not, I don't mean that it is "bad" art or a "bad" practice by the "privileged" label itself—I do believe the sensation, experience, emotion, etc. that  could  be conveyed or induced back then on Times Square is acknowledgeable. And by all means, I myself am of a much privileged perspective to write and comment here. Notwithstanding, it will become irrefutably a "bad" practice, even according to my fluid and usually loose standards, when the privileged are indeed ignorant of the privilege and wield it, loud and sound.  	That's when the last three lines change the game. Given the entire essay is, obviously, very much for the "institution" in terms of its tone and stance—clear but rhetorical enough and tickling but not breaching—the familiarity with this kind of writing comforts me as well as repels me. On the other hand, the last three lines, with no capital letters, no punctuation, and a sudden colloquial tone, eventually—at least as it appears to me—kick in to dismantle the well-and-sound facade.  	At this point, I really cannot tell if those lines are a part of the original essay by Manen or if it was an Easter egg by Rozendaal to defy/question the "it is for you" story (actually, either case would be much interesting), nor can I tell if it's another performance/rhetorical device in the narrative. Still, just like how the essay questions whether it really matters if it is "art(works)," my  no-difference attitude  would sneak in here again—essentially, I'm not about to judge the essay or the artwork themselves, but to use them still as a reflection/reality check of my own point of view.  	Therefore, for sure, beyond these meta-critiques, when it comes to Rozendaal's websites themselves, there are concrete merits worth noticing. To put it in a nutshell, I would say that it is his ability to abstract concepts and reproduce them in a controlled span{} of possibilities. Many times, when it comes to the typical 'digital media art,' we start from a fixed starting point with some number of rules, parameters, and a degree of freedom; and when we wade into the chaotic field that consists of one configuration and another, we can easily lose track of the happening when the parameterization is simply out of human comprehension—even if we understand the system well enough as the creator. In Razendaal's case, however, it seems that he has a very strong conceptual realm built in mind, which allows him to come up with systems with visual variations that individually ramify and collectively symbolize the concept itself, despite how different the variations could be, balancing the outrage of randomness and the predictability vs. novelty.  	In a sense, I would say many of his website pieces can be regarded as sensational demos to showcase how much 'information' we could condense into one word/one concept, and how much 'potential' one could imply. I intend not yet to take sides in the ongoing debate about the nature of intelligence, specifically those triggered by LLM-ish intelligence, which says a part of the nature of intelligence  could be  the condensation of information. But compared to understanding how information is being condensed into latent space, I guess Rozendaal's sites are at least helpful to demonstrate how sensations are condensed into texts.