Digital Altars: How Stillness on the Web Turns Websites into Art
The modern web rewards momentum: it treats stillness like an error state.
A frozen frame? It must be a glitch. An empty page? Someone forgot to add content. A moment without action? And here we are trying to refresh the page. In a world so densely packed with information that our minds sometimes boil, the web, which started to ease communication, became a means of abusing communication. This avalanche is real, and it’s releasing on us every second we’re online: calls to action, popups, videos playing on auto-load, carousels, twinkling text and images, short videos with captions in x2 speed, buttons, more calls to action, and hovering elements. Almost every website we stumble upon is purely functional, algorithmic, packed with marketing gimmicks, and all kinds of information.
But if we create the other web and fill it with websites that don’t shout for our attention, but welcome us like a quiet room we’d want to linger in—minimal, well-designed, thoughtful, and artsy? And where’s the margin after which web design becomes art?
The idea that a space, physical or digital, can slow us down and help us be in the moment is not new. Philosopher Gaston Bachelard, in his book The Poetics of Space (1958), wrote about the way certain elements of architecture, such as corners, alcoves, or windowsills can hold our imagination and transfer us to special moments and states. A desk drawer, a beam of light, and a shadowed stairwell are not features but rather evokers of daydreaming. The web, too, can contain such nooks: small, carefully made pages that welcome you in and let you get an experience without agenda or expected actions.
In art history, the creation of such atmospheres also has a name, hierotopy, the making of sacred spaces. The notion was introduced in 2002 by Alexei Lidov. According to him, cathedrals, shrines, and sanctuaries are not accidents of stone and glass: they are orchestrations of light, icon, scent, and ritual. You enter them and feel yourself inside differently because the space is designed for such a sensation. Websites, knowingly or not, can draw much from this concept. They can open like a chapel door: with curiosity and intention. A loading animation or the first visible elements become a threshold, a single photograph can serve as an altar piece, and a text that emerges out of the blue can substitute a prayer.
In their moving beyond utility, some websites begin to resemble art installations more than traditional pages. Claire Bishop, in her Installation Art: A Critical History, observes that installation work often prioritizes the visitor’s experience. She notes that in such contexts, the medium is experience itself, where environment, pacing, and atmosphere become integral to the work’s meaning. A digital altar, likewise, isn’t just seen; it is inhabited by you: its navigation slows you, its silence draws you in, and its typography and pauses feel like light and shadow in a gallery.
Meanwhile, Arthur Danto’s Artworld theory argues that something becomes art not due to intrinsic properties but through its reception within an interpretive community, the Artworld, that frames it as such. When a website is designed and approached with intention, inviting contemplation rather than consumption, it enters that world. Its code becomes paint, its layout a canvas, and its interface choreography. Once the viewer’s intention aligns with the space’s intent, we stop “using” it and begin to experience it as art.
Below is a small curated collection of websites made with soft dedication and inviting to contemplate and see. They’re crafted with Readymag, a web design tool that lets creators express whatever lives in their head on a blank canvas, storytell with visuals, motion, and type, and go live without being limited by grid and repetitive routine.
Anton Repponen’s Museum of Online Artifacts treats each digital relic he created with reverence, allowing it to be examined in motion and without competition. Those artifacts are ungrouped, unsorted, and do not fit into any category known. They are the shatters from the whole, which never existed. The pacing is deliberate, and in the silence between scrolls, you begin to notice how fragile, mundane, and at the same time striking design work can be, and how quickly it might disappear without a keeper and storyteller. And, of course, without you, the watcher.
Outcomes Studies, a project from Non-Objective design studio, explores the randomness in consequences of the same actions performed on objects, greets you with measured grids and generous breathing room. Nothing seems to ask for clicks. Instead, the visual order holds your attention the way a wide museum hall does. You enter, you think, you approach, you observe, you dive into the idea, and continue to explore it visually with your eyes and internally in your head. The website is a research and a meditation on observation.
Coffee Receipt Stories collection by Odding works differently, but with equal care: scraps of paper, meant to be thrown away, carry intimate sketches she made in her travels around Japan. You scroll not out of compulsion, but curiosity, as through a box of keepsakes someone let you peep into. You can hover on them to reveal stories, sort by topics and experiences as you could have done with the real receipt doodles, and just literally feel the paper under your hands.
Everything Can Be Scanned, whose creator is anonymous, also follows a similar “post stamps collector” path and feels like an archaeological dig, presenting objects as if they’ve been rescued from the waters of Lethe. You’re encouraged to look closely, not to move quickly. The rhythm is slow, the light dim enough to make you lean in. You own these objects now, even if in the digital.
Those still projects emerge out of the desire to keep, archive, share, and invite. They don’t hold a call to action, they don’t expect anything from you, they just exist.
Fragments, Pavel Kedzich’s nostalgic meditation on a city that never existed, embodies this principle in a beautiful way. The combination of black and white AI-generated imagery and crafted typography feels like a guided dream about the reality of Pavel’s post-Soviet youth. It doesn’t try to tell you everything; it leaves openings for your own memories to seep in. The faces and streets start to be unsettlingly familiar, as the light leaks lull you adrift.
If there is a thread running through all these digital shrines, it is their refusal to compete for your attention and their kinship to art. They are off the race because what they say matters enough to need room. They are art because we experience them, not just use them, and let them be art in our own world. There is something quietly radical in their inefficiency. Most websites belong to the architecture of restlessness and the paradigm of usefulness. However, the websites shared here show another possible path. In technoromantic terms, they resist the purely functional or algorithmic and instead seek to evoke longing, tenderness, or beauty. They give form to the idea that digital space can be sacred: not in the religious sense, but in the sense of being set apart from the ordinary, protected from noise, filled with the divine, and truly experienced. The question is whether we are willing to build and visit such places. Will these quiet places become rarer, artifacts of a web that once dared to move slowly? Or will they multiply, forming a counter-landscape of sanctuaries, galleries, and personal skyscopes amid the noise?
It is tempting to imagine a future where stillness and contemplation are not a luxury but a standard value. For now, these spaces remain rare, but they are proof that there is another web, which doesn’t serve as yet another perturbator but a place to digitally be.
Now I’ll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
— Pablo Neruda
Sponsored and contributed by the brilliant minds at Readymag. A design tool that lets you create websites without boundaries.