Exhibitions don’t have to belong to institutions. In 2010, Rafaël Rozendaal designed a format ANYONE could create: BYOB - Bring Your Own Beamer. ↓ Here’s the story of how it began, and how it changed the way exhibitions were made ✨ 1/

In 2010, Rafaël Rozendaal introduced BYOB: Bring Your Own Beamer, a one-night exhibition format with three simple steps: ➡️ Find a space ➡️ Invite many artists ➡️ Ask them to bring their projectors 2/

How it works (and why it’s accessible): ➡️ Invite-based participation: Each BYOB is organized locally. The organizer invites the artists who will “bring their own beamer.” (Some editions experimented with open sign-ups, but most kept invitations curated to manage space and power.) ➡️ Open source format: Anyone can organize a BYOB (non-commercial, credit Rozendaal), which decentralizes exhibition-making. Budget can be close to zero: a room, electricity, and projectors. ➡️ Flexible medium: Projection lets works overlap and react to each other. Artists can rearrange on the fly, creating a collaborative, improvisational environment. ➡️ Community-run: BYOB puts curatorial power into many hands, different organizers, different cities, different constellations, broadening who gets to show and see media art. Since 2010, hundreds of BYOBs have been staged worldwide, from Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and New York to São Paulo, always guided by the same ethos: easy, fun, no stress. 4/

BYOB translates to the physical world what Rozendaal has achieve online: art that remains public and widely accessible. His early single-serving websites lived at their own domains, free for anyone to visit; his Art Website Sales Contract ensured that even when collected, those works stayed online. BYOB extends that spirit offline, community-organized, and built for sharing. 5/