I created an online tool that allows anyone to create a playlist of their favorite webpages. You can experience them as a fullscreen slideshow on any screen with a web browser.
This has multiple uses:
- Art-lovers: take an old iPad, frame it like a painting, and re-use it as an art-screen on your living room wall.
- Companies: create digital signage in public spaces.
- Museums and galleries: make it easier to show webpages in exhibits.
How it works
After creating a free account any user can create a playlist. Users can choose to make a playlist public or keep it private, meaning that only people they share the URL with can see it.
Public playlists are listed on the site and can be experienced by anybody. They can be sorted by theme, popularity or how recently they have been created.
Each playlist has a detailed page about which webpages (or images) it contains, and allows their ‘curators’ to also offer a description of what it is contains.
By pressing the play button the playlist will be played full screen, and start looping through all the webpages in the list. The menu and mouse can be hidden by resting the mousepointer in the top left corner of the screen.
You can visit the website or jump straight into a playlist of animated gifs.
Why?
In recent years startups like FRM and Electric Objects have created wonderful but expensive screens that were specifically made to show internet art. My goal was to make this concept accessible to an even wider audience. Since many people already own screens with browsers (like an old iPad for example), they can save money and the environment by finding a new user for these screens.
Colofon
I created the website in just a week, by building it on top of the open source Drupal CMS. Back in 2015 I had already created a prototype.