Digital art websites

Not all web art hangs politely on a wall. A lot of it moves, reacts to your cursor, or runs entirely on a few lines of code. The digital art websites in this category are the ones you do not just look at but play with.

Silk turns cursor movement into flowing, mirrored ribbons of light. Zoomquilt is a collaborative painting you can fall into forever. Bomomo is a drawing toy with strange generative brushes, made by Philipp Lenssen in 2008 and still working. For code-minded visitors, Shadertoy shows real-time graphics written entirely as shaders, and Dwitter squeezes animations into 140 characters of JavaScript. Staggering Beauty is the wild card: it reacts violently to your mouse, and it opens with a warning for flashing images and loud noise, so mind the volume and skip it if you are photosensitive.

There is also a quieter, archival side. 16colors preserves ANSI art from the BBS era, and Google Arts & Culture lets you zoom into museum collections.

We include creative-coding galleries because they are where a lot of the web's best art lives, and we skip anything that is mainly a shop. For the calm end of the spectrum, see Satisfying; for the code-heavy end, Interactive. Or let the button pick a canvas for you.