BYOB began from a practical observation. Rafaël Rozendaal was living in Berlin and noticed that many artists around him owned projectors. Instead of waiting for a museum to supply equipment, walls and a finished curatorial structure, he and Anne de Vries invited artists to bring their own beamers to a one-night exhibition in 2010. The instruction was deliberately simple: find a space, invite many artists, ask them to bring a projector.
That simplicity changed the social structure of the exhibition. Each projector created a temporary territory, but light could overlap, spill across architecture or collide with another work. Installation happened quickly and remained visible as a process. Cables, tables and improvised surfaces were not backstage problems. They became part of an event assembled by the participants themselves.
Rozendaal kept BYOB as an open format rather than a protected franchise. It travelled to other cities because the idea could be repeated without reproducing the original exhibition exactly. The projector was both display device and admission ticket.
For a contemporary VJ, BYOB still offers a useful correction to the pressure for ever larger screens. A strong projection does not begin with scale. It begins with a clear relationship between image, surface, neighbouring light and the people moving through the room.
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