In June 2026, the Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned a work called The Thinking Ocean for its artport website. Created by Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter, it is an interactive generative experience that runs in real time inside a web browser. It uses WebGPU, a graphics technology that allows high-performance rendering and general-purpose computation directly in the browser. You can open it on a laptop or a phone. It is also an installation and a live performance. The piece does not exist as a downloadable application or a gallery-only object. It lives at a URL, and anyone with a modern browser can experience it. This is browser art in 2026: art that uses the web browser as its medium, its gallery, and its distribution system.
Browser art is art made with or for web browsers. The browser is the canvas, the studio, and the exhibition space. The artwork is written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, WebGL, WebGPU, or related web technologies, and it is experienced by opening a URL. Browser art overlaps with net art, but the two terms are not identical. Net art is the broader category of art made for or about the internet, which can include email, social media, and networked installations. Browser art is more specific: the browser itself is the medium, and the artwork runs inside it.
This entry covers the history of browser art from the mid-1990s to WebGPU works in 2026, the artists who defined the form, and how the browser went from being a novelty to a legitimate exhibition platform for major museums.
What Is Browser Art and How Does It Work?
Browser art is created using web technologies. At its simplest, a browser artwork might be an HTML page with styled text and images. At its most complex, it involves real-time 3D graphics, physics simulations, machine learning models running locally in the browser, and interactive elements that respond to user input. The browser renders the artwork live on the viewer's device, which means the artwork is generated anew each time someone visits the URL.
The technical foundation of browser art has evolved alongside web standards. In the 1990s, browser art used HTML, GIF animations, and early JavaScript. The introduction of WebGL in 2011 allowed browsers to render 3D graphics using the GPU, opening the door to interactive 3D artworks. By 2026, WebGPU began replacing WebGL in newer browsers, offering even higher performance and general-purpose computation. The three.js JavaScript library, first released by Ricardo Cabello (Mr.doob) in 2010, became the most widely used tool for creating 3D browser art, lowering the barrier to entry for artists who wanted to work in 3D without learning low-level graphics APIs.
What makes browser art distinct from other digital art is that the browser is both the medium and the context. A digital painting can be printed or displayed on any screen. A browser artwork exists only in the browser environment. It depends on the browser's rendering engine, its JavaScript interpreter, and its support for specific web standards. When a browser updates and drops support for an old technology, browser artworks can break. This fragility is a defining characteristic of the medium and a conservation challenge for museums.
Origins and History
The Early Web Era (1995-2005)
Browser art emerged in the mid-1990s, when artists began experimenting with the web as a creative medium. The Russian artist Olia Lialina created My Boyfriend Came Back from the War in 1996, a hypertext work that uses HTML frames, text, and images to tell a fragmented story. It is one of the earliest and most cited examples of browser art. Lialina's work used the browser not as a display tool but as a structural element: the frames load at different times, the viewer navigates by clicking links, and the story changes based on the path taken.
The British artist JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) created www.jodi.org in 1995, a work that appeared to be a broken website full of raw HTML code and glitching text. View who knew how to view source discovered that the code itself formed ASCII art of a nuclear mushroom cloud. JODI's work exposed the browser as a constructed environment and questioned the distinction between code and content. The work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Other early practitioners included Alexei Shulgin, who performed Form Art (1997) using nothing but HTML form elements (buttons, checkboxes, text fields) arranged to create visual compositions, and Shu Le Cheang, whose Brandon (1998-1999) was a multi-year internet project commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, the first internet art commission by a major museum.
The Flash Era (2000-2010)
Macromedia Flash, and later Adobe Flash, became a dominant platform for browser art in the 2000s. Flash allowed artists to create animated, interactive works with vector graphics, audio, and video. Joshua Davis (praystation) created generative Flash artworks that combined code and visual design, influencing a generation of web artists. The Whitney Museum's artport, launched in 2002, became a dedicated online space for browser-based commissions.
When Adobe announced the end of Flash support in 2017, many Flash-based artworks became inaccessible. Museums and archives faced the problem of how to preserve works that depended on a dead plugin. The Rhizome organization, founded in 1996, developed tools like Flash emulation in the browser to keep old works accessible. This preservation crisis highlighted the ephemeral nature of browser art and the need for active conservation.
The WebGL and WebGPU Era (2011-2026)
The introduction of WebGL in 2011 transformed browser art by enabling real-time 3D graphics without plugins. Artists like Mr.doob, who created three.js, and Raphael de Courville, who created the Sketchfab platform for sharing 3D models online, made 3D browser art accessible to a wider community. The three.js library became the standard tool for browser-based 3D art, used in everything from interactive data visualizations to generative art.
By 2026, WebGPU began appearing in production browsers, and artists started using it for computationally intensive works. Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter's The Thinking Ocean, commissioned by the Whitney Museum in 2026, uses WebGPU and three.js to create an interactive generative ocean environment that responds to viewer input. The work runs on most recent laptops and phones, requiring iOS 26 or later on Apple devices. It demonstrates how browser art has moved from simple HTML pages to real-time generative experiences that rival desktop applications in visual quality. Explore the work at Whitney Museum artport.
Key Artists and Pioneers
Olia Lialina (b. 1971)
Lialina is a pioneer of net art and browser art. Her My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996) uses HTML frames to create a branching narrative that the viewer navigates by clicking. The work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Centre Pompidou, and the New Museum. Lialina has also written extensively about the history of web culture and the importance of preserving early internet art. She teaches at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart.
JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)
JODI's www.jodi.org (1995) is one of the most influential browser artworks. It presents a seemingly broken website that reveals ASCII art when the HTML source is viewed. JODI continued to make browser-based works that challenge the viewer's expectations of how a website should behave. Their work is in the collection of the Whitney Museum and has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale.
Memo Akten (b. 1975)
Akten is a computational artist and researcher who works with machine learning, generative systems, and real-time graphics. His The Thinking Ocean (2026), commissioned by the Whitney Museum, uses WebGPU to create an interactive generative experience that runs in the browser. Akten's earlier work Learning to See (2017) used neural networks to interpret and reconstruct images, and his practice bridges generative art, machine learning, and browser-based art.
Ryan Seslow (b. 1979)
Seslow is a new media artist who has been making browser-based art for over a decade. In June 2026, he published A Decade in the Browser, an online exhibition collecting works he created on platforms including mmm.page, NewHive, and to.be between 2015 and 2025. The exhibition is a record of how browser art platforms have come and gone, and how artists have had to preserve their own work when platforms shut down. Seslow's practice highlights the fragility of browser art and the importance of artist-driven archiving. View the exhibition at ryanseslow.com.
Zoi Roupakia
Roupakia created Apophenia (2026), a browser-based interactive artwork that uses JavaScript, WebGL, GLSL shaders, and machine learning models running locally in the browser. A CLIP-based vision-language model analyzes generated images and attempts to classify perceived objects. All inference takes place on the viewer's device, meaning no image data leaves the browser. The work explores the tendency of both humans and machines to perceive meaning in ambiguity. It represents a 2026 trend in browser art: using in-browser machine learning to create works that are interactive, private, and computationally sophisticated. Explore the work at apophenia-2026.netlify.app.
Browser art has always depended on platforms that provide artists with tools to create and host works. NewHive, founded in 2012, gave artists a browser-based canvas for creating multimedia pages. It shut down in 2018. The platform to.be offered similar capabilities and also closed. mmm.page, launched in 2020, allowed users to create collage-like web pages and became a popular tool for browser artists before closing in 2025. The pattern is consistent: platforms launch, attract artists, struggle with monetization, and shut down. Artists who do not back up their work lose it.
KUNSTSURFER, a browser-based art space active in 2026, takes a different approach. It runs as a browser extension that recognizes advertisements on web pages and replaces them with digital exhibitions. In February 2026, it presented Chronically Online, a group exhibition by Sara Bezovsek, Beti Frim, and Neo Nor that hijacked ad spaces to disrupt scrolling habits. The exhibition explored nostalgia for the early web and critical engagement with contemporary internet culture. This approach turns the browser itself into a curatorial tool, intervening in the existing web rather than creating a separate art space. Learn more at Aksioma.
The Whitney Museum's artport, launched in 2002, remains the most significant institutional platform for browser art. It has commissioned works by artists including John F. Simon Jr., Olia Lialina, and Memo Akten. The fact that a major museum maintains a dedicated online space for browser art gives the medium institutional legitimacy that it lacked in its early years.
Browser art is closely related to net art, which is the broader category of art made for or about the internet. It overlaps with digital art as one of its major disciplines and with generative art when the artwork is produced algorithmically in the browser. Browser art also connects to glitch art, as many early browser artists used broken HTML and visual glitches as aesthetic tools. For more on digital art, read our post on the history of digital art from pixel to prompt, or explore our guide to digital art.
See Browser Art in Practice
Browser art is best experienced by opening a URL. Start with the Whitney Museum's artport, which hosts commissioned browser artworks including Memo Akten's The Thinking Ocean (2026). Then visit Ryan Seslow's A Decade in the Browser exhibition to see how browser art platforms evolved and disappeared over ten years. Finally, explore Zoi Roupakia's Apophenia (2026) to see how in-browser machine learning is expanding what browser art can do.
If you want to trace the history of the medium, start with Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), still accessible online, then move to JODI's www.jodi.org (1995), and end with the Whitney's 2026 commissions. You will see how a medium that began with HTML frames and GIF animations evolved into real-time generative experiences running on WebGPU. For more on the broader context, read our entries on net art and generative art, or explore our post on the history of digital art.
