The web art project ‘Hiding in plain website’ is a website that hides on the screen. It serves as a playful commentary on a prevailing design trend: the increasingly invisible interface.

The web art project ‘Hiding in plain website’ is a website that hides on the screen. It serves as a playful commentary on a prevailing design trend: the increasingly invisible interface.

The project actually traces back to 2016, when I developed the Camouflage Computer Program (https://github.com/maximiliankiepe/ccp) under the supervision of computer art pioneer Frieder Nake. That earlier work explored the same core idea but was written in Processing, making it less accessible to a broader audience.

The overall concept is rooted in a book Frieder recommended to me: Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency by Diane Gromala and Jay David Bolter. In it, Gromala and Bolter argue—contrary to Donald Norman’s well-known dictum—that we do not always want our computers to be invisible “information appliances.” They contend that invisibility or transparency is only half the story; the goal of digital design is to create a rhythm between transparency—enabled by mastery of the interface—and reflection—as the medium itself shapes how we understand our experience of it.

Maximilian Kiepe, Concept, Idea, Development