Ryan Seslow · Net-Art
A Decade
in the Browser
Browser-native net-art, 2013 to 2025
For more than ten years I made finished works of art inside the web browser itself. Not designed elsewhere and uploaded, but composed live on the open canvas of whatever platform offered one.
The works below were made on mmm.page and captured whole. The platforms that came before it are remembered further down, in words, because their work cannot be shown the way it once lived.
mmm.page
Single-screen collages built live on mmm.page. The complete, re-buildable source of every piece is preserved off-platform, so these survive the platform itself. Each links to its live page while mmm.page lasts.
Before mmm.page
Before mmm.page there were two platforms that made this work possible: NewHive and to.be. They were genuinely great, and genuinely ahead of their time. Each gave artists an open canvas in the browser, a blank field where image, motion, sound, and text could be composed live, with no template and no rules. to.be was a real place too, a studio in New York City where Nick Dangerfield welcomed my classes for tours and let students put their hands on technology most people would not see for years. NewHive, built by Zach Verdin and his team, gave a whole generation of net artists their first canvas. Both were given to us for free.
Neither fell apart on purpose. They were generous tools that could not outrun their own growth, and the cost of giving something away to millions of people eventually caught up. When NewHive went down, Zach and his team tried to bring it back and to archive the work. The comeback never fully arrived. to.be took a different path and became Planeta, which went on to build the first VR museum of GIF art for GIPHY and the David Bowie Is augmented reality exhibition, and Nick later moved into new work in sound. Through all of it, Zach and Nick stayed the same: kind, responsive, proud of what they made.
What I learned from watching these platforms disappear is simple. The work survives only if the artist keeps it. So when I came to mmm.page, I backed everything up. Its creator, known as XH, is cut from the same cloth as Zach and Nick: generous, present, quick to answer. I was mmm.page's first paying customer, and XH has supported my work ever since. This time, if the platform ever goes, the art will still be here. That is the whole point of this archive.
A Teaching Record
I used NewHive and to.be as teaching tools, and made tutorials with them. Each tutorial once ended in an embedded frame showing the finished piece live. Those frames are empty now. The art is gone, but the writing around them remains, and it documents how this work was taught and made. These are kept here for the record.